Where have all the flowers gone?
By Kate Simon
News reporters as well as gardening writers will be poised with their pens for the opening of RHS Hampton Court today in case Just Stop Oil stages another paint protest.
Few can have missed the climate activist group putting a new twist on the opening of the annual garden show season when they threw paint at the RBC Brewer Dolphin Garden at RHS Chelsea in May, declaring: “We can’t tend the garden and ignore the world on fire.”
Opponents of the action countered that the targeted garden had an environmental message and the RHS imposes strict sustainability criteria on participants.
Whatever your take on the protest, it’s fair to say that the RHS garden shows aren’t just about pretty peonies these days. Questions about equality, opportunity and the environment increasingly dominate the agenda. The RHS now insists that all its show gardens ‘have a plan for where their garden will live on’.
One should hope so. These plots don’t come cheap – the garden that got an unwelcome lick of paint cost £300,000 to create. Tickets to the shows are pricey, too. It costs from £33.85 to get into Hampton Court this week.
Wayward, a landscape, art and architecture practice, works with all the RHS shows to distribute plants and trees to schools and community spaces around London. More than 80 recipients benefited this year from 6,000 plants and trees from RHS Chelsea. You can even volunteer to help rehome the plants, your heavy lifting rewarded with a peek behind the scenes of the famous venues.
Meanwhile, charities can apply to exhibit a garden at an RHS show that’s inspired by their cause through Project Giving Back. The scheme supported 15 gardens at Chelsea in 2023, which are now heading in part, or as a whole, to new locations.
The project’s website features a handy map that reveals where you can visit some relocated gardens on your travels around Britain. Many have been replanted in the grounds of centres run by the charities concerned, such as the Alder Hey Urban Foraging Station, which is now on view at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool.
Others can be found in established attractions, such as family-friendly RHS Garden Bridgewater in Salford, which is now also the home of the new Blue Peter Garden, first revealed at RHS Chelsea. This garden is all about soil and the creatures that lurk within it – sport your Blue Peter badge to get in for free.
A little further off the beaten track is the Grow2Know community garden in North Kensington. It’s the permanent location of Hands Off Mangrove by Grow2Know, pictured, first shown at RHS Chelsea. The garden is close to the site of the Mangrove Restaurant where the Mangrove Nine social activists met. They, along with the destruction of mangrove forests, provided the inspiration for designers Tayshan Hayden-Smith and Danny Clarke, founders of non-profit community interest company Grow2Know, which was born in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The aim of the garden is to raise awareness of ‘the profound impact that social and environmental injustice can have on local communities and the wider world’. Who says politics and gardening don’t mix?
Phil’s Beer Notes
Industrial estates may not be the obvious places to find greenery, but where there’s a craft brewery involved, you never know. And the foliage at Wiper and True’s new-ish tap room in the centre of Bristol has recently caught the eyes of beer writers Boak and Bailey who describe it as “like a park or a botanical exhibition”.
Hops are, of course, vital to beer, but Hogs Back Brewery is rare to have its own hop garden in the fields next to its brewery near Tongham, Surrey. You can even watch the bines grow while you savour a freshly poured pint at its tap room and garden.
Many pubs have established kitchen gardens to cut down the food miles to a few feet, and perhaps the most ambitious was opened last year by Oakman Inns at the Akeman Inn at Kingswood in Buckinghamshire. Set over 1.2 acres, it includes apple and damson orchards as well as growing fruit, vegetables and herbs for the group’s pubs. Open days offer guided tours with Oakman’s gardeners.
Beer gardens are mostly about the views, but one pub where you can really get in amongst nature is the Gaggle of Geese at Buckland Newton in Dorset. Its five acres of grounds are home to orchards and wildflower meadows, and guests can spend the night in shepherd’s huts or furnished bell tents.
Photo © RHS/Neil Hepworth