What am I most looking forward to seeing at the Chelsea Flower Show next week? My list includes a volcanic dreamscape illuminating how seeds survive in hostile environments (the King’s Trust garden designed by Joe Perkins); a rocky landscape inspired by the mountainous regions of Mallorca (Tom Hoblyn’s garden for Hospice UK); and a sculptural sand garden complete with 2-metre-high dunes and drought-tolerant planting (Nigel Dunnett for the Scottish charity Hospitalfield Arts).
These three gardens — along with seven other designs — are sponsored by Project Giving Back (PGB). The scheme, launched in 2021, pairs garden designers with charities and funds the resulting creations. By next year, when its programme ends, it will have underwritten and relocated 60 gardens. Its to-the-point tagline is “Gardens for good causes” but its impact has been complex and multi-faceted. Not only have its initiatives radically shifted the dial at the show — pioneering a pivot from big commercial sponsors to charitable endeavours — they have turbocharged a fundamental change in design.
For Dunnett, who returns to Chelsea next week after an eight-year hiatus, it was the PGB line-up in 2023 that was the real game-changer. In particular, he cites the gardens designed by Cleve West, Tom Massey and Wild City Studio, which all highlighted brownfield or abandoned sites. “They completely switched the thinking away from more traditional styles to something much wilder,” he says. “Project Giving back has allowed things to be much more risky and experimental.”
Designer Allon Hoskin, co-founder of London-based landscape studio Modular, agrees. “It really has been groundbreaking,” he says. “That drive to do something ‘good’, rather than thinking about publicity and corporate sponsors, is really helpful.”
Hoskin’s involvement with the Chelsea Flower Show stretches back some 20 years: first building show gardens, then judging them, now creating them. This year as part of PGB he has co-designed the garden for homelessness charity Pathway alongside Robert Beaudin. Their urban forest of alder and hazel trees produces a dappled canopy over understated planting, including ferns, foxgloves and shade-loving grasses and perennials. A path snakes through the space, past mossy boulders, to a large bench that’s been crafted from a fallen redwood tree.
Conveying the charity’s message is key, but so too is innovation and careful use of resources. Hoskin’s pitch was to make the most sustainable Chelsea garden yet. It uses no concrete or cement and everything from the wooden furniture to the paving slabs has been upcycled or recycled. The theatrical structures that tower over the space are made of mycelium — the complex root systems of fungi that live below the ground — and inspired by the charity’s supportive networks. Developed in collaboration with the Magical Mushroom Company, the material was created from last year’s shows’ waste.
“We are asking designers to look at how they build gardens in a different way,” says Alex Denman, a trustee for PGB and also a one-time show manager for Chelsea. Working to PGB’s stipulations forces designers to push boundaries. It’s challenging, says Hoskin. “But it’s also really rewarding — this is part of the future, part of sustainable change.”
Change is certainly afoot at Chelsea; last year event organiser the Royal Horticultural Society introduced a green audit for all of the large gardens at the show in a bid to reduce its carbon footprint. The design changes resulted in a 28 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.
Furthermore, all PGB gardens “just touch down at Chelsea and then springboard off to new homes”, explains Denman. Miria Harris’s garden for the Stroke Association is now in situ at the Chapel Allerton Hospital in Leeds, while Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg’s 2023 Best in Show garden for Horatio’s opened earlier this month at the Princess Royal Spinal Cord Centre Injuries in Sheffield. This element of relocation further spreads the organisation’s values.
More planet-friendly approaches are synchronised with an aesthetic shift. Dunnett’s sand garden for Hospitalfield Arts is centred on plants that have the resilience to survive climate change. Rather than mimicking the vegetation of the Arbroath coastline that inspired his scheme, “it’s much more about the fact that coastal plants have to put up with extremes — wind, cold and heat, dry and wet — all the time”, he says. “It’s a statement for the future.”
His garden uses Scots pine trees; drought-tolerant shrubs such as cistus, phillyrea and rosemary; and aromatic silver-leafed plants including santolina, artemisia, ballota, phlomis, lavender and Helichrysum italicum, the curry plant. There are grasses (Festuca glauca, Briza media and the aptly named Leymus arenarius “Blue Dune”) alongside colourful perennials such as viper’s bugloss, sea thrift, red valerian, euphorbias and sedums. The sand substrate is essential; many of these plants will not flourish in the cold, wet soil of a UK winter.
For the charities, “the gardens allow them to tell a story that is impactful”, says Denman. The show provides both a high-profile global platform as well as a chance to meet 170,000 visitors in person. The results are significant. In 2022, the RNLI raised £800,000 in a single evening event at its garden, while Centrepoint received significant donations for its Independent Living Programme in the wake of its 2023 participation with Cleve West.
When performing arts venue Sadler’s Wells took part in 2023, it reached an audience of 4.4mn on social media during May, and the gardens can also prompt direct contact from those in need. In the same year, the Samaritans was contacted by 185 individuals seeking help after they saw its Chelsea show garden.
For designer Jo Thompson, who has won four gold medals at Chelsea, the compelling work of The Glasshouse, a charity providing female prisoners with horticultural training and support, gave her reason to return to the show she had previously said she would not come back to. “It makes the whole process feel more real and purposeful,” says Thompson, whose immersive woodland garden of river birch trees is studded with fragrant roses, foxgloves and grasses. “As a designer you’re not just creating something beautiful for one week; you’re thinking deeply about the women preparing for release at HM Prison Downview, who will inherit the garden, about how it will bring them together and help them.”
Denman refers to the PGB model as “creative philanthropy” that has the power to create long-lasting change — not only in horticulture and design, but also in people’s lives. It’s a blueprint, she says, for how “big corporations can now support charities. Hopefully, this framework will lead the way.”
The Chelsea Flower Show, May 20-24, Royal Hospital Chelsea,
London; rhs.org.uk
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