Behind the scenes at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show: the best planting displays inside The Great Pavilion

Chelsea Flower Show is about to open to the crowds this week. We take a sneak peek at the best new plants on display inside the show's iconic Great Pavilion
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Alex Mitchell20 May 2019

The Great Pavilion at Chelsea is a dramatic showcase of the world's leading nurseries and growers, with more than 80 exhibitors creating dazzling displays of new plants, garden designs and planting techniques.

The Stihl Hillier stand, always a draw, has been given a contemporary update by young designer Lily Gomm who has based the planting around a dining and seating area and a modern ‘rain curtain’.

"It can be overwhelming to go to a garden centre and just see lots of plants so I wanted to show how people could use plants in a garden setting," Gomm explains.

If growing food appeals, head to that strange neon pink mound in the centre of the marquee for Gardening Will Save the World, designed by Tom Dixon and Ikea.

The show’s first ever indoor judged Show Garden, this dual-storey garden aims to show how you can grow plenty of food even in cities.

The lower level showcases underground hydroponic herbs and salads while the upper storey, which visitors can climb over, is planted in crates with vegetables and forageable fruit bushes.

Dixon welcomes being inside because "whatever the weather, at least we’ll be dry".

But even inside you can’t control everything. Duncan Cargill and Colm Joseph, designers of the Perennial Lifeline Garden, are pondering how to dissuade a pair of robins from perching on their stylish dark grey pillars and, well, leaving evidence behind them.

Their garden showcases a new style of planting roses that could catch on in London gardens.

"We’ve combined roses with grasses and perennials to make a rose meadow," says Joseph. "The idea is that you just cut the whole lot down to the ground in winter each year so it’s really low maintenance."

The garden is based on the Laskett Gardens bequeathed to the charity Perennial by Sir Roy Strong. "He came yesterday and said it was 'stylish'," reports Cargill. "From a style icon himself, that is praise indeed."

Plants: what’s hot and what’s not

Trees are, literally, big at Chelsea this year. From the giant gingko and monkey puzzle tree on Sarah Eberle’s stunning Resilience Garden for the Forestry Commission to towering pines in Wedgwood and a beautiful leaning pine on the Morgan Stanley garden, the message is clear: Plant trees, look after our woodlands, and adapt them to climate change.

The Savills and David Harber garden imagines a city oasis with a central shallow pond and sculpture surrounded by broad-leaved trees.

In the Viking Cruises Garden designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, another that could be translated to a city garden setting, pollarded willow trees make a naturalistic backdrop behind a rocky stream.

Planting in many of this year’s gardens is restful and the colours perhaps rather more subtle than last year’s explosions of zingy oranges and purples.

Mark Straver, of the nursery Hortus Loci has supplied plants for the show gardens for the past 25 year including several this year. "I’d say bruised and moody planting is popular this year, deep clarets, purples, dark blue."

These jewel colours stand out against a prevailing backdrop of restful greens and whites with pale yellow flowers proving popular too.

The chrysanthemum display at National Chrysanthemum Society exhibit contains 7000 blooms
Alex Mitchell

Giant Angelica plants are a feature in many gardens, helped, says Chris Beardshaw, by last year’s hot summer that prepared the plants for dramatic flowerheads this year.

And we can expect sales of common valerian (valeriana officinalis) to rise after this year’s Chelsea. The tall, pale pink perennial works its magic in several of the best gardens this year.

Likely to cause discussion is the unmown grass and buttercups in the Savills and David Harber Garden – naturalism taken a step too far or the right approach in our environmentally challenged times?

Vegetable growers will find plenty to feed their imaginations in the exuberant Camfed Garden: Giving Girls in Africa a Space to Grow.

Designer Jilayne Rickards has recycled materials and sourced them from skips and ebay to make this charismatic evocation of a Zimbabwean classroom complete with thriving compact food growing area.

She was even donated a puff adder skin from London Zoo. As Rickards said on Instagram, "These snakes are common in Zimbabwe and I think it’s a first for Chelsea. Certainly rivals last year’s cow pat!"

Water, water everywhere

Canals, pools, rivers, streams, waterfalls, even a beach complete with delightful lapping waves in Joe Perkins’ Facebook Beyond the Screen Garden, Chelsea is getting its feet wet this year. Don’t forget to wait for the ripple effect in the Savills and David Harber garden.

For most designers, keeping the water clear is the biggest challenge. Chris Beardshaw is in his socks with a giant skimming net to remove leaves from the shallow pool at the centre of his very smart garden for Morgan Stanley.

Jonathan Snow, designer of the Trailfinders Garden, took to a rubber dinghy to finish the riverside planting on his southern Chilean rainforest for Trailfinders.

For most designers, keeping the water clear is the biggest challenge. For Mark Gregory, though, authenticity is key so he has been swirling up the soil at the bottom of his Welcome to Yorkshire Garden canal to make the water convincingly murky.