The King and Queen and celebrities will get a first glimpse of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show on Monday, after a dry spring has put pressure on the build-up to the event.
England has had the driest start to spring for decades, and with extremes of drought, heatwaves and floods set to become the norm with climate change, some gardens at RHS’s annual festival of gardening at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea in London are exploring what that future might look like.
But there are also gardens which are deliberately designed not to have a “message”, as Monty Don focuses his first – and he says “I hope my last” – garden at the show on all things dogs.
Mr Don has teamed up with the show organisers to create the RHS and Radio 2 dog garden, filled with features for dogs including a lawn, water to wallow in and trees to cast shade, as well as plants such as foxgloves and alliums.
The TV gardener defended their inclusion, saying they were blooms he had alongside his pets without problem in his own garden, and urged owners to exercise common sense about plants around their dogs.
He told the PA news agency: “I wanted to see a garden at Chelsea that didn’t have a message, that didn’t set itself in an exotic situation, was absolutely set fair and square in 2025 in England and that was full of plants that either I did have or everybody could buy from their local garden centre, and with trees or shrubs that were native or long adapted to this country.”
The garden, which will not be judged, will be relocated to nearby Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, with any toxic plants removed.
Charles and Camilla will see the names of their dogs inscribed on the brick paths of the garden when they tour the world famous horticultural event on Monday, joined by the Duke of Edinburgh and Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.
The first garden for the King’s Trust, designed by Joe Perkins, has a focus on adapting to climate change and the ability of “pioneering” plants to thrive in extreme rainfall and drought, to represent the resilience of young people supported by Charles’ charity.
It is one of a number of gardens looking to a future with more extremes of drought, heat and flooding as the climate changes.
And after a rewilding garden which recreated a beaver-influenced landscape won best show garden at Chelsea in 2022, it is the Wildlife Trusts’ turn to bring a slice of the wild to the flower show, with their rainforest garden.
The garden showcases the threatened Atlantic temperate rainforest habitat which once swathed western coasts of Britain, the island of Ireland and the Isle of Man, but has shrunk from about a fifth of land to just 1%.
The garden at Chelsea will highlight efforts by the Trusts, in partnership with insurance company Aviva, to restore and protect the habitat, and show how nature-friendly gardening can help British wildlife.
Speaking during the build-up to the show, in which ornate gardens are created from bare earth in a matter of days, designer Zoe Claymore said she wanted to create a garden that was “perfectly imperfect”.
She has drawn inspiration from the Dart Valley in Devon, a rich habitat of ferns, mosses and lichens festooned on rocks and trees, and the garden has plants cascading down rocky surfaces and a leaning silver birch to highlight nature’s fragility, and resilience, in the face of extremes such as storms.
“My job is to make the British public love temperate rainforest,” she said.
The dry conditions have made that job harder, as the moisture-loving ferns and mosses have needed regular misting during the garden’s construction.
Garden designers and nurseries displaying at the show have had to contend with plants going over too soon or not coming into flower in time for the show as a result of the dry and sunny weather, and displays have had to be adapted to cope with the conditions.
