Chelsea represents the peculiarly British love affair with horticulture
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW WHAT TO SEE
Show Gardens: Created by internationally renowned landscape architects and garden designers to inform and inspire.
Highlight: The Quilted Velvet Garden. Based on a dream, the idea here is an arduous journey through the everyday world of work that arrives at a place of comfort and luxury. The foreground invites the onlooker into a sunken bed of lavender busy lizzies.
Urban Gardens: Designers are challenged to find clever solutions to restrictions in space and a conflict of uses – such as roof gardens with their chimneys and vents – while providing an area for relaxation and entertaining.
Highlight: Eco Chic garden. Intended for unloved and overlooked spaces between tall buildings in our towns and cities. The hard landscaping is deliberately industrial (scaffold poles and boards, as well as expanded mesh walkways and simple permeable flooring), softened by leafy shade-tolerant planting.
The Great Pavilion: Full of leading exhibitors from around the globe.
Highlights: Bloms Bulbs showing 13,000 cut flower tulips, with varieties ranging from the 17th century to the present day; Winchester Growers with an enormous display of dahlias; Tynings Climbers displaying its National Plant Collection of Passiflora. Other displays highlight the importance of water; Cayman Islands Department of Tourism with Newington Nurseries is creating an underwater display to represent the marine life of the Caymanian waters.