It’s Chelsea week – officially the start of the Season – so brace yourself for acres of breathy coverage and All The Tropes from SW3. The Royal Walkabout! Red-coated Chelsea Pensioners being patronised! Glossy influencers who wouldn’t know a peony from a Philip Treacy pillbox hat knocking back champagne! Expect many, many shots of people’s backs as they struggle to see anything for the price of their £122 (or more) ticket.
Oh, and the gardens themselves. Something of a sideshow to the main event of being seen to be there, the format rarely deviates. There’s the ‘Eco’/ ‘rewilded’/ ‘woo woo’/ ‘hortiwoke’ garden; essentially a curated collection of weeds you could see on any railway embankment. The celebrity garden (this year David Beckham is doing the honours, with a bit of help from the King — as you’ll know already because it’s been drip-fed by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) press juggernaut for months). You’ll also have read about Chelsea lifting its gnome ban this year, because the King, being posh, is partial to one (he has one in the Stumpery at Highgrove).
Then there are the usual giant monolithic hulks along Main Avenue designed by men (as one female designer laughs hollowly, more men called Tom have won Best in Show than women over the past 20 years). This is curious, given that the gardening industry and so many of its totemic figures, past and present — from Vita Sackville-West to Mary Keen to Isabel Bannerman and Jo Thompson — have X chromosomes, but then, the RHS is not exactly forward-thinking and often obtusely tone-deaf.
Take The Lady Garden Foundation’s Silent Garden for 2026, with its planting transitions of soft greys, pinks and blues to bold, vibrant tones, designed to ‘open up uninhibited conversations about gynaecological health’. As you contemplate one of the ‘five sculptures, each representing one of the five gynaecological cancers’, why not reflect on the fact that this is the work of a male designer, Darren Hawkes — a face palm moment for the RHS if ever there was one.
This year’s ‘spicy’ garden comes (no pun intended) from what the RHS coyly calls ‘sexual wellness’ brand, Lovehoney. (Translation: they sell butt plugs and cock rings.) ‘Aphrodite’s Hothouse’ is ‘boundary-pushing and a little bit naughty’, promises the press release, including a ‘Tunnel of Love’ positively ‘dripping’ with ‘sultry’ orchids, ‘glistening’ Anthurium and ‘pendulous’ Nepenthes. Ooh pardon! Imagine what the Queen Mum would have said. In the past few years, the RHS has worked hard — if ineffectively — to combat accusations of ‘greenwashing’. I couldn’t ascertain if Lovehoney’s Vibrating Rabbit Double Penetration Strap-On (£29.99) was made of sustainable silicone, but at least it’s not single-use plastic, I suppose. Though they are made in China.
Take The Lady Garden Foundation’s Silent Garden for 2026 designed to ‘open up uninhibited conversations about gynaecological health’
And here is the main issue that proper gardeners have with Chelsea, and it’s not the (lack of) women problem — though that desperately needs addressing. It is the egregious waste that goes into creating these temporary structures: the tons of concrete and hardcore brought in then taken away, the plastic plant pots transporting the hothouse-grown out-of-season blooms, the fumes belching onto the Embankment from the set-up and delivery lorries idling for hours.
It’s all perversely at odds with the RHS mission statement, which wangs on about ‘being committed to being net positive for nature and people by 2030’, putting the charity ‘to work for the planet’ and posits gardening as key to tackling ‘the climate emergency and dramatic loss of biodiversity’. That’s hard to square with the fact that the RHS only banned fake grass from its show gardens — something no right-thinking person would ever have had in their house (well, you know what I mean) — as recently as 2022. A ban on peat only came in at the start of this year.
While Britain’s leading garden charity still hasn’t phased out concrete from its shows, individuals are attempting to do something more green, viz Harry Holding’s garden for the new Eden Project in Morecambe, with its vast ‘clam-crete’ structure (‘a sustainable, shell-based concrete alternative’). It’s a ‘landmark structure’ according to the design team; ‘a monstrosity’ counters one prominent gardening writer. Harry imagines it as a place for ‘young adults to come together and learn about horticulture, foraging and crafts’. Nice idea Haz, but they’ll probably use it to vape and neck BuzzBallz.
Chelsea does at least now insist — through its Project Giving Back — that these six-figure, corporate-sponsored show gardens need to be installed elsewhere, but as this scheme is now coming to an end it’s unclear what will happen to these edifices, each with a carbon footprint the size of David Attenborough’s.
Only Sir David has ‘done more for horticulture, gardening, natural history and the environment’ than the King, gushed Keeper of the Brown Nose Alan Titchmarsh in last week’s Radio Times. When the most prominent proponent of eco-gardening of them all is also getting in on the act (with The King’s Foundation ‘Curious Garden’), something really has gone skew-whiff. Though the ‘Curious Garden’ does feature a water butt, so that’s alright then.
When Clare Coulson, author of Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home (more than half of the 20 featured are female) posted her concerns about Chelsea on Instagram recently, dozens of women in the industry commented — including Isabel Bannerman, whose bulging CV includes Highgrove. She wrote that doing a garden for Chelsea is ‘my idea of hell … RHS has a history of being behind the curve vis à vis many things; organic gardening for one, peat, women — Gertrude Jekyll was a founder, but it’s lost its heart.’
For many, the real heroes of Chelsea are the growers in the tent, the successive generations of hardworking plantsmen and women who provide the raw materials on which these gardens depend. Good design is fundamental to any garden, but the lionising of mostly male designers at the expense of their female counterparts, the environment and the growers who make it all possible shows something has gone very wrong at Chelsea.
So park any thoughts of FOMO and pick up an NGS brochure or visit their website to find out which enchanting gardens are open near you this week. No crowds, no concrete, no content creators — and a fiver, tops, to get in.
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