Chelsea Flower Show 2025

Garden Trends, Sustainability, and Personal Design Stories

The theme for Chelsea Flower Show 2025 is ‘Your Space, Your Story’, exploring how gardens can animate personal passions and stories. My interpretation is how this manifests in gardens as a space to hold and inspire, and how their design can bring into focus what’s important in our lives. However garden design also needs to be as friction free as possible for us, it has to fit with our climate, lifestyle, how we use the garden and our time available to tend to it.

Sustainability and Slower Living in Garden Design

Garden trends indicate increased interest in sustainability and designs inspired by nature. Hopefully this is a sign of collective embracing of nature and learning from it rather than seeking to impose upon it. The Addleshaw Goddard: Freedom to Flourish Garden is inspired by the landscape of North Norfolk with representations of cliffs and wildlife habitats. It’s designed to embrace nature’s call for an unhurried pace of life. I’m into this, a bee isn’t in a hurry despite being called ‘busy’, and mimicking unbusy productiveness would be better for us all.

Gardens That Adapt to a Changing Climate

The Killick & Co Futureproof Garden designs by Baz Grainger is designed to withstand unpredictable weather patterns and features resilient trees and plants that you’d normally see in Southern France or Northern Spain. The garden is designed for families using Rainscaping Techniques. I had to look this up and it sounds amazing, it’s a landscape technique that uses natural or designed features to manage and repurpose stormwater runoff. It involves redirecting rainwater to permeable areas, like garden beds or rain gardens, to help absorb it into the ground. Presumably this would work for outdoor bathtubs and hot tubs too, I hope boutique hotels pay attention to this.

AI in the Garden… Help or Hindrance?

The Garden of the Future from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is another forward thinking garden. This design is informed by scientists, researchers, farmers who are developing and implementing innovative approaches for adapting to climate change and our warming world. It will feature climate-resilient ornamentals, crops and edible plants in order to show how to harness innovation when it comes to the climate.

The Avanade Garden will use AI technology to feedback to the owner about conditions and enable them to garden more sustainably. Personally I feel on the fence about this (excuse the pun) as my fridge and dishwasher beep all the time and I’d like the garden to be a nag-free space. I’d also be wary of outsourcing our ability to observe and understand nature to AI, as a new mum I found myself downloading all sorts of apps to help me understand my baby which largely made me feel less in tune with my instincts- I wonder if this would be be same for an AI garden…

Gardens for Dogs, Children, and Pensioners

Children, Chelsea Pensioners and dogs (high up on the list of garden appreciators) feature on the Chelsea Flower Show agenda. The Radio 2 Dog Garden will celebrate Britain’s love of dogs and move to the Battersea Dogs Home after the show ends. There will be an (unjudged) section on plants which are toxic to dogs, I hope this doesn’t move to the Dogs Home. The Children with Cancer garden is called ‘A Place to be…' and designed by Rod Coutts-Harwood and Tom Clarke. It will have a fun sounding monorail, a pool and a path to make a space where children can be carefree, happy and refreshed. The London Square Chelsea Pensioners’ Garden will reflect their ceremonial roles as well as being a place to relax in. 

Gardening with Purpose and Awareness

Gardens are also being created to raise awareness. The Tackle HIV Challenging Stigma Garden designed by Manoj Malde features tree statues as a tribute to lives lost to HIV and the stigma that persists. Hexagonal paving references a key chemical structure found within many HIV medications. The Down’s Syndrome Scotland Garden will feature a crazy paving path and a building with decorative tiles, and will challenge the misconceptions faced by people with Down’s Syndrome. 

Water, Pergolas, and Pavilions

Pergolas and water features seem to be on the books for a number of gardens, and we are here for this. A garden should be a space which is comfortable to laze in, and which encompasses all the senses - and there’s nothing more soothing than the sound of water, if it doesn’t make you need the loo. The Boodles Raindance Garden by Catherine MacDonald will feature circular motifs and a platinum coloured Raindance Pavillion which channels water to a circular rill. The Glasshouse Garden is centred around a magical sounding translucent elliptical pavilion, emerging from foliage and inspired by the work of Glasshouse Botanics to give women a sense of purpose as they approach the end of their prison sentence. The Pathway Garden by Allon Hoskin and Robert Beaudin supports access to healthcare for people who have experienced homelessness, it will be created only using upcycled materials and incorporates boulders, paths and pergola and a water feature.

Rocks, Tea Houses, and Alpine Themes

There is a strong rock theme in the designs The Cha No Niwa Japanese Tea Garden designed by Kazuyuki Ishihara features a Japanese Tea House amidst maple trees, and stones are key to the design. The Hospice UK: Garden for Compassion explores unexpected climate and planting parallels between County Durham and the mountainous areas of the Mediterranean, and uses rocks to create a sense of being grounded in nature to bring calm at the end of life. The British Red Cross garden will be a contemporary twist on an alpine garden. Large hexagonal (hexagons again) stone column-like planters will mimic traditional alpine troughs and there will be areas of scree and crevice planting. I suspect that this one will heavily influence the current alpine spree here at West Lexham, mountains and scree not being much in evidence in Norfolk. 

Your Garden, Your Rules

Mulling over these designs and the inadequacies of my own gardening ability the theme ‘Your Space, Your Story’ comes to mind. Your garden has to work for you, for your lifestyle, geography, free time and gardening skill.

For me, my space and story would honour the space I’ve borrowed from Mother Nature and the responsibility that comes with that.

My fantasy garden would have only small areas of grass to lie down upon, and prioritize biodiverse plants that encourage wildlife. It would reflect my love of cooking and scent and it would be filled with spreading thyme, lavender bushes and trailing rambling roses for the bees.

The best part of a garden is being able to lounge in it under a parasol. I’ve always longed for a chamomile seat, and a platform in the branches of a blossoming apple tree so I can fill every part of my sight with flowers in spring, leaves in summer, and fruit in autumn. I’d also have a rill lined with terracotta tiles through the lavender bushes to paddle in.