A Century of Champions: The Past Winners of the Chelsea Flower Show

There is a moment, every May, when the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea are transformed into something that defies easy description. The air is thick with the scent of roses, cut turf and warm earth. Visitors move slowly along Main Avenue, pausing, craning their necks, pressing their faces close to petals that in a few days will be gone. And somewhere among the marquees and the show gardens and the brimming floral displays, a group of judges is making decisions that will shape the direction of British horticulture for years to come.

The Chelsea Flower Show — formally the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, successor to the Great Spring Show that first occupied this corner of south-west London in 1913 — is the most celebrated garden show in the world. It is not simply an exhibition. It is a living argument about what gardens can be, what they should say, who they are for and why, in a complicated and often difficult world, they matter so profoundly. And at the heart of that argument sits the question of excellence: which garden, among the many extraordinary efforts assembled along Main Avenue and beyond, represents something truly outstanding?

The gold medal is the benchmark. It is awarded to exhibits that attain a standard of horticultural and design brilliance that leaves the judges in no doubt. But above the gold sits the Best in Show award — the summit of competitive gardening, the prize that every designer dreams of from the moment they first sketch an idea on paper. To win Best in Show at Chelsea is to enter a different kind of conversation, to join a lineage of extraordinary creators whose work has shaped not only the show itself but the wider landscape of British gardening taste, design philosophy and horticultural ambition.

This article traces that lineage in depth — from the early rock garden specialists who won gold before the concept of a Best in Show award existed in its modern form, through the transformative decades of the twentieth century, and into the extraordinary present, where Chelsea's winners increasingly reflect a world grappling with climate change, social justice and ecological crisis. It is a story told in soil and stone, in plants and planting philosophies, in the personalities of remarkable designers who each, in their own way, answered the question that Chelsea poses every year: what is a great garden?

The Early Years: Rock Gardens, Grand Visions and the Birth of a Tradition

To understand Chelsea's winners, you have to go back to the beginning — not just of the show as it exists today, but of the culture of ambitious horticultural display that made it possible.

The first Chelsea Flower Show opened on 20 May 1913, held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea by the Royal Horticultural Society. It was a successor to the Great Spring Show that had been staged at various London venues since 1862, moving from Kensington to the Temple Gardens and finally, after a one-off Royal International Horticultural Exhibition in the Chelsea grounds in 1912, finding a permanent home on the eleven acres that would become hallowed ground for gardeners everywhere.

The early show was dominated by large-scale rock gardens — elaborate constructions of stone and alpine planting that required enormous horticultural skill and considerable financial backing to execute. The only gold medal awarded to a garden at the very first show — out of a total of seventeen gold medals distributed across all exhibit categories — went to John Wood, a landscape architect and alpine garden specialist based at Boston Spa in Lincolnshire. Wood was an expert in the kind of naturalistic rock construction that was fashionable in the Edwardian era, and his garden embodied the spirit of the times: ambitious, grand in its way, and rooted in a particular vision of what nature might look like when refined and curated by a skilled hand.

Wood's success established a template. For the next several decades, the rock garden was the dominant form on Main Avenue. Firms such as Pulham and Son, Backhouse and Ingwersen created vast constructions year after year, competing for medals with gardens that attempted to replicate the drama of mountain landscapes within the confines of a London showground. Clarence Elliott — one of Wood's friendly rivals — became a celebrated figure in this world, his gardens combining technical mastery with a genuine botanical knowledge that impressed both judges and visitors.

Elliott's relationship with Wood was characterised by the friendly rivalry that has always animated Chelsea at its best. When Wood won his gold for a garden of particular naturalistic verve, Elliott jokingly suggested that it was so convincing it needed only a pair of alpine goats to complete the illusion. Wood, in the spirit of the joke, duly arranged for a pair of goats to appear in his 1914 garden — a stunt that almost certainly led the RHS to institute its well-known ban on livestock at the show, a prohibition that has occasionally inspired creative protest in the decades since.

The interwar period brought new voices and new visions. In 1929, a figure appeared at Chelsea who is often credited with inventing the modern show garden concept: Minnie Hoyt, usually referred to in the press of the time as Mrs Sherman Hoyt, an American society figure and pioneering environmental activist. Representing the Garden Club of America, Hoyt brought to Chelsea a trio of scenic gardens with painted backdrop panels, designed to illustrate the natural environments of California, including the Mojave Desert and Death Valley. The American cacti she displayed were so impressive that they were subsequently acquired for Kew Gardens, where they occupied their own glasshouse for more than half a century before being incorporated into the Princess of Wales Conservatory.

What Hoyt understood — and what would take British show garden design many more decades to fully absorb — was that a garden at Chelsea could be something other than a conventional garden. It could be an evocation, a scene, an argument, an emotion. Her painted backdrops prefigured the increasingly theatrical approach to show garden design that would characterise Chelsea from the 1980s onwards, and her commitment to representing native ecology anticipated the naturalistic planting movement that is now one of the dominant forces in garden design worldwide.

The 1930s brought Percy Cane to Chelsea's main stage. Cane was one of the most celebrated designers of the era, exhibiting eleven gardens at the show and winning gold medals for eight of them. In many ways a product of the Arts and Crafts tradition — the movement that had done so much to define British garden design in the early twentieth century — Cane nevertheless brought a contemporary sensibility to his work. Generous terraces, shallow flights of steps and a controlled but not rigid formality characterised his designs, which struck a balance between the established and the modern that Chelsea's conservative-minded early judges found easier to reward than outright experimentation.

Alongside these regular competitors, the show also hosted more exotic presences. Seyomon Kusumoto, a Japanese designer based in Edgeware who created more than two hundred gardens in the United Kingdom between the 1920s and the late 1950s, introduced Chelsea audiences to Japanese garden principles at a time when such aesthetics were still largely unknown in Britain. His highly disciplined designs, rooted in centuries of Japanese horticultural philosophy, hinted at the extraordinary impact that east Asian garden design would eventually have on the show — an impact that culminated most brilliantly in the extraordinary achievements of Kazuyuki Ishihara in the twenty-first century.

The Second World War brought the show to a halt. The grounds of the Royal Hospital were requisitioned by the War Office for use as an anti-aircraft site, and there was genuine uncertainty in 1947 about whether Chelsea could resume. Plant stocks were depleted, horticultural staff had been lost, and fuel for the greenhouses was available only with special permits. But the then RHS President, Lord Aberconway, and his council were determined that the show should return, and return it did — reduced in scale but undiminished in spirit. The Chelsea Flower Show's ability to bounce back from interruption has proven one of its defining qualities: interrupted by two world wars, disrupted by a pandemic, it has always found a way to persist.

The Post-War Decades: When Gardens Grew Ambitious

The 1950s and 1960s saw Chelsea begin its journey towards the more recognisably modern show it would become. The Great Marquee — described by the Guinness Book of Records at 3.4 acres as the world's largest tent — replaced the series of smaller tents that had previously housed the floral displays, and the increased space brought increased ambition.

In 1951, a show garden based on Himalayan flora required twenty-three truckloads of plants borrowed from RHS Wisley — a logistical undertaking that illustrated just how serious Chelsea was becoming as a competitive arena. The Queen attended in 1953, the year of her coronation, and her presence — then as in the decades that followed — confirmed Chelsea's status as an event of national significance that went well beyond the horticultural world.

The year 1959 brought a moment of genuine cultural novelty: The Times became the first newspaper to sponsor a Chelsea garden. Their Garden of Tomorrow was a bold statement of mid-century optimism, featuring what were described as 'the most modern aids to horticulture', including a radio-controlled lawn mower that delighted visitors and attracted considerable press coverage. It was the first glimpse of the idea that a show garden could carry a message beyond the purely horticultural — that it could reflect the preoccupations and anxieties and hopes of its moment in history.

That idea would become central to Chelsea's identity over the following decades. As the twentieth century progressed, garden designers increasingly saw the show as a platform for argument and expression, not simply for technical display. The 1967 show introduced the first garden specifically designed for disabled visitors — a remarkable moment of social consciousness in a world that had not yet fully grappled with the concept of inclusive design. The 1968 display of hostas at Wisley's stand, meanwhile, demonstrated how Chelsea could single-handedly transform the fortunes of a plant genus: the show's ability to launch plants into mainstream popularity has been one of its most enduring contributions to the gardening world.

The 1970s brought a crisis of a different kind. As the show's popularity grew, crowding became a severe problem. Attendance climbed by six thousand visitors in a single year in 1978, and by 1979 the situation was so acute that the turnstiles were temporarily closed. The RHS experimented with extended opening hours and reduced entry prices in the afternoons, eventually imposing a limit of forty thousand visitors per day in 1988 — a reduction of ninety thousand in total from the previous year. Ten thousand members resigned in protest at being charged for tickets for the first time.

The overcrowding crisis also triggered serious debate about whether Chelsea should move to a larger venue. Battersea Park, Osterley Park and Wisley were all considered. A feasibility study was commissioned. And ultimately it was decided that Chelsea should stay at Chelsea — a decision that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems obviously correct. The show's location, embedded in the grounds of Sir Christopher Wren's great Royal Hospital, is inseparable from its identity. To move it would be to change its essence irrevocably.

The 1982 show brought a remarkable moment of botanical revival when Brenda Hyatt mounted a display of auriculas — the velvet-faced alpine primulas that had been popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but had fallen into relative obscurity — that single-handedly relaunched these extraordinary plants into public consciousness. It is the kind of moment Chelsea has specialised in throughout its history: the sudden rehabilitation of something overlooked, the rediscovery of lost beauty.

The Wilkinson Sword Era and the Birth of Modern Best in Show

For much of the twentieth century, the Best in Show award for show gardens existed in various forms and under various names. The Wilkinson Sword for Best Show Garden was a prestigious prize through much of the mid-century period, but it was discontinued in 1988 — the same year that admission caps were introduced. The RHS reinstated the best show garden award in 1991, in conjunction with Fiskars, under the name the Sword of Excellence.

The first winner of the reinstated award was the Daily Express Garden, 'The Forgotten Pavilion', designed by John Van Hage — a historic moment in which Van Hage became the youngest designer to win a gold medal at Chelsea. His was a garden that demonstrated the qualities the reinstated award was designed to celebrate: not merely technical excellence but emotional resonance, genuine design vision and a quality that the judges described as inhabiting the space between beautiful execution and compelling idea.

The award's early years generated some controversy. In 1993, Julie Toll's seaside garden won the Fiskars Sword of Excellence in a decision that divided opinion sharply. Critics, including the influential designer David Stevens, questioned whether it truly counted as a garden at all — describing it as a beautifully planted sand dune that, while aesthetically successful, lacked the fundamental qualities of a designed space. The argument was a preview of debates that would resurface repeatedly in subsequent decades, particularly as naturalistic and wild-garden aesthetics became more dominant in show garden design: what is a garden, exactly? Must it be recognisably designed? Can nature itself be the designer?

The 1994 show brought one of the most admired gardens of the decade: Isabel and Julian Bannerman's Daily Telegraph Old Abbey Garden, which wowed visitors and judges alike with a virtuoso display of mature tree transplanting — large, established specimens moved into position to create the effect of a garden that had been growing for generations. Alongside it on the showground, Julian Dowle's Sunday Express Railway Garden charmed with its combination of railway artefacts, wildflowers, vegetables and cottage garden plants, a celebration of an older, more vernacular approach to gardening that retained enormous popular appeal even as design-led gardens were increasingly dominant.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd was one of the defining figures of this era, winning six gold medals and the Best in Show award in 1998. An Italian-English landscape designer who exhibited through the 1990s and into the 2000s, Lennox-Boyd brought a strongly structured approach to her Chelsea gardens, deploying shrubs and evergreen plants as the bones of her compositions and overlaying them with perennial flowers in combinations that seemed both sophisticated and, crucially, genuinely beautiful. Her 1998 win was not without controversy — the Belgian designer Jacques Wirtz publicly accused her of plagiarism, an allegation that was not widely credited among her contemporaries — but the gardens themselves spoke with unambiguous authority.

The late 1990s also saw the emergence of designers who would shape Chelsea for the next twenty years. Dan Pearson, who would go on to become one of the most celebrated naturalistic designers in the world, won gold at Chelsea in 1996 with a London roof garden that was remarkable for its time: imaginative, sensitive to its environment and rooted in a genuine understanding of how plants relate to one another. Christopher Bradley-Hole arrived in 1997 with his Latin Garden — the first Chelsea show garden to exhibit what was then a new and somewhat controversial fashion for sparse planting, in which the individual plant was allowed room to breathe and the negative space between plants became as important as the planting itself.

The New Millennium: Tom Stuart-Smith and the Corten Steel Revolution

The year 2000 brought two remarkable gardens to Main Avenue. The Garden History Society's Le Nôtre Garden was a stately evocation of the grand French classical tradition, a reminder of the deep roots from which European garden culture grew. And alongside it, Piet Oudolf's 'Evolution' garden announced the arrival in Britain of the Dutch wave — the planting philosophy of which Oudolf was the great pioneer and publicist, characterised by bold massings of perennials and grasses in combinations inspired by natural communities rather than traditional herbaceous border aesthetics.

Oudolf's influence on British garden design cannot be overstated. His Chelsea garden was a revelation to many who encountered it: where traditional English planting was varied and exuberant, Oudolf's was disciplined and structural; where English gardens favoured a certain informality of texture, Oudolf brought a sweeping, ecological coherence. The plants he used — prairie grasses, tall perennials, seed heads as ornaments in their own right — would become the lingua franca of garden design in the following two decades.

In 2002, Mary Reynolds arrived at Chelsea and became the youngest garden designer to win a gold medal at the show. Reynolds, an Irish designer who would later be immortalised in the film 'Dare to Be Wild', created a garden rooted in Irish mythology and wild landscape — a deeply personal vision that moved many who saw it. Her achievement at such a young age opened a conversation about how the show might nurture emerging talent, a conversation that has grown steadily more important over the years.

But the most seismically important Chelsea garden of the early twenty-first century was arguably that created by Tom Stuart-Smith for The Daily Telegraph in 2006. Stuart-Smith — quietly spoken, rigorously intelligent, and possessed of what his admiring peers describe as an extraordinary gift for understanding how plants relate to their surroundings — created a garden that announced a new aesthetic moment at Chelsea.

The garden featured rusted Corten steel walls and water tanks of a kind that had not previously been seen in a Chelsea show garden. Running through the space was a stunning thirty-metre rill, its edges formed by the same oxidised metal. The planting was in various shades of green and herbaceous blooms in shades of bronze, purple and orange — combinations that felt simultaneously avant-garde and utterly right. And there, among the supporting plants, was a shrub that most designers had previously ignored as too ungainly: Viburnum rhytidophyllum, with its magnificently kinked branches silhouetted against the Corten steel wall.

Stuart-Smith's rehabilitation of this previously derided shrub was characteristically perceptive. The garden showed visitors not just a beautiful space but a new way of seeing — a demonstration that overlooked plants, given the right context, could be extraordinary. The garden won gold and demonstrated the quality of what Stuart-Smith would go on to achieve throughout his career, establishing him as one of the defining designers of his generation. His work since has consistently moved between the intimate and the monumental, between carefully composed naturalism and precisely calibrated structure.

What the 2006 show established more broadly was that a new Chelsea aesthetic was emerging: one in which industrial materials like Corten steel and raw concrete were no longer opposed to planting but in dialogue with it, in which the palette of plants had been expanded to include species from Mediterranean scrubland, North American prairie and South African fynbos, and in which the concept of 'naturalistic' planting — plants arranged to suggest natural communities rather than garden tradition — was gaining serious ground.

Sarah Eberle's Life on Mars: 2007

If 2006 belonged to Tom Stuart-Smith and a certain cool, disciplined northern European aesthetic, 2007 brought a garden that was its absolute opposite in every conceivable way — and won Best in Show for doing so.

Sarah Eberle's '600 Days with Bradstone' garden was like nothing Chelsea had seen before. Nicknamed in the press 'The Life on Mars Garden', it was conceived as a rest and recreation space for astronauts returning from an extended mission on the Martian surface — a concept so audacious that it might have seemed simply absurd, but which Eberle executed with such conviction and such genuine horticultural skill that the judges were captivated.

The garden featured burnt-red rammed earth walls that convincingly evoked the Martian landscape. Rusted iron sculptures rose from the ground. Steaming pools suggested geological activity. And the planting — this was where Eberle's achievement was most remarkable — introduced a palette of spiky, drought-tolerant plants that would have been entirely at home in an arid alien environment: succulents, ornamental grasses, plants with architectural form and minimal water requirements that popped up through the shallow pockets of the baked-earth landscape.

Eberle would go on to become the most decorated designer in the history of the Chelsea Flower Show, a record she broke in 2016. But 2007 was the moment that established her particular genius: the ability to conceive a garden around a powerful, even outlandish, concept without losing sight of the horticultural fundamentals. She understood that a Chelsea Best in Show winner must succeed on every level simultaneously — as an idea, as a designed space, as a collection of plants and as an emotional experience. The Life on Mars garden did all of this and then some.

In the same year, Ulf Nordfjell's telegraph garden demonstrated a very different kind of excellence. A walkway of polished granite through umbrella-trained crab apples summed up the elegance of this Swedish-inflected design, which brought a Scandinavian sensibility to Main Avenue. Nordfjell used timber screens, painted in rusted red on one side and cool grey on the other, to divide his garden into a woodland area and a garden room, connecting them with a pebble-lined formal stream. The planting, mainly in tranquil greens and whites, was built up in exquisitely judged layers. The Telegraph Garden that year also won gold — an illustration of how a single year could produce multiple outstanding gardens, each excellent on its own terms.

2008: Andy Sturgeon and Tom Stuart-Smith Strike Gold

The 2008 show was remarkable for producing two gold medal gardens of outstanding quality, by two designers whose styles could hardly have been more different but who both achieved something genuinely exceptional.

Tom Stuart-Smith's Laurent-Perrier Garden of 2008 marked his return to the Main Avenue after the triumph of 2006, and it more than justified the anticipation. This was the garden that his admirers describe as one of all-time favourite Chelsea creations — a real haven of dappled shade and tranquillity, in which the softness of the planting contrasted with an elegant bronze pavilion designed by architect Jamie Fobert. The immense cloud-pruned box hedge that bordered the pool was a feature that many designers have attempted to emulate since, but the real revelation was the plant Cenolophium denudatum — an elegant white-flowered umbellifer that Stuart-Smith used with characteristic precision and that went on to appear in gardens across the country in the years that followed.

Meanwhile, Andy Sturgeon was emerging as a major force with a garden that used windows of Corten steel, raised linear walkways and dry stone walls of limestone in a composition that was both excitingly contemporary and deeply beautiful. The planting palette was in orange, citrus and purple — an unusual combination executed with great confidence, featuring Verbascum 'Clementine' and the extraordinary Iris 'Action Front' as star performers. The Hard landscaping was dramatic and specific, but it was the planting that gave the garden its particular emotional quality.

What Chelsea 2008 demonstrated was that the new materials — Corten steel, raw concrete, exposed aggregate — were becoming genuinely absorbed into the vocabulary of garden design, no longer shocking but now available as tools for designers of real skill. The question was not whether to use these materials but how, and the answer in each case came down to the quality of the planting that accompanied them.

2009 and 2010: The Credit Crunch Years and Andy Sturgeon's First Best in Show

The 2009 show was shadowed by the financial crisis. Sponsors were withdrawing, budgets were being trimmed and there was considerable anxiety about whether the show could maintain its usual scale. There was much talk in the press about 'credit crunch Chelsea' and what austerity might mean for an event whose show gardens frequently cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to create.

The anxiety proved somewhat overdone. Chelsea's resilience was demonstrated by the extraordinary public appetite that continued to fill the showground every day. And the show produced one of its most memorable moments: James May's Paradise in Plasticine, a garden made entirely from the modelling material, painstakingly assembled by an army of volunteers and documented for his television programme James May's Toy Stories. May was awarded a special Plasticine Gold Medal — a wonderfully absurd addition to the show's catalogue of prizes — and the garden captured the public imagination in a way that few more conventionally prestigious exhibits managed.

The 2010 show saw Andy Sturgeon take the top prize for the first time, with a Best in Show award that confirmed his growing status as one of the most inventive designers working at Chelsea. Sturgeon is a designer who combines bold architectural elements — large stones, dramatic water features, strongly geometric structures — with planting that is always exploratory, frequently drawing on plants from wild habitats that have not previously been widely used in garden design. His 2010 Best in Show garden bore all these hallmarks: a landscape of rock and water with planting of striking originality, including unusual specimens that gave the garden an almost archaeological quality.

The same year, Tom Stuart-Smith created a Laurent-Perrier garden that drew considerable admiration — described by those who saw it as a garden that got better and better as the week wore on, its subtleties only fully revealing themselves after repeated visits. This quality of a garden that rewards extended attention is one of the things the best Chelsea show gardens have in common: they are not simply spectacular at first glance but contain depths that only gradually disclose themselves.

Cleve West Makes History: Back-to-Back Best in Show, 2011 and 2012

No designer had ever won Best in Show at Chelsea in consecutive years. When Cleve West achieved this feat in 2011 and 2012, he entered the show's history books in a way that acknowledged not just outstanding work but a remarkable sustained level of achievement.

West's 2011 garden for the Daily Telegraph was inspired by his visit to the Roman ruins at Ptolemais, in Libya — a visit that planted in his imagination the idea of a contemporary sunken garden rooted in the feeling of archaeological discovery. The garden featured towering concrete pillars from the French artistic duo Serge Bottagisio and Agnes Decoux, which rose from the ground like the remnants of a vanished civilisation. Against these dramatic sculptural elements, West placed traditional Cotswold stonework — the combination of contemporary sculpture and vernacular craft creating a tension that was both intellectually satisfying and visually extraordinary.

The planting celebrated the ephemeral quality of self-seeding plants — those romantic volunteers that appear unbidden in the cracks of old stone and at the base of walls. This was the garden that introduced many Chelsea visitors to Dianthus cruentus, the velvet-red alpine pink, and to the strange beauty of the humble parsnip's starburst blooms when allowed to flower freely. West's gift for recognising unexpected ornamental potential in overlooked plants has been a consistent thread through his Chelsea work, and in 2011 it produced one of the most memorable planting combinations the show has seen.

The same year, Luciano Giubbilei's Laurent-Perrier Garden was a masterclass in restraint and precision. Clear-stemmed Parrotia persica trees framed a meditative space at one end of a garden of two contrasting halves, where architect Kengo Kuma's exquisite bamboo-panelled pavilion took the design of garden buildings to a new level. Peter Randall-Page's swirling boulders and a clear, still pool provided the counterpoint, and soft romantic planting in shades of bronze, pink and rust lined the waterside approach. For many observers, Giubbilei's garden was equally deserving of Best in Show, and the debate it generated illustrated how fiercely the Chelsea community cares about the judging process.

West returned in 2012 to achieve what no designer before him had done: win Best in Show for the second consecutive year. His 2012 Telegraph Garden showed the same qualities as its predecessor — imagination, horticultural precision, emotional depth — but in a different register. Where the 2011 garden had been dramatic and archaeological, the 2012 garden was more intimate and carefully composed, its success depending on subtler effects: the quality of the light, the weight of the planting, the way materials met and separated. That he won again was a testament to his ability to produce outstanding work consistently, and to his particular sensitivity to the requirements of the Chelsea space and moment.

In the same year, Sarah Price created a Telegraph Garden that many of her colleagues considered worthy of Best in Show in its own right. Her garden was a beautifully constructed essay in wildness — a distillation of various aspects of British countryside in its most dreamy, romantic mode. Waterside and woodland-edge native plants formed the core of the planting, but Price's hand was firmly evident in the geometric copper-edged pools, the straight paths and the deliberate contrast between sawn and natural stone surfaces. It was a garden that showed how naturalism and discipline could coexist — and it featured Melica altissima alba in a way that made many visitors rush to their nearest nursery.

2013: Centenary Year and the M&G Garden

The 2013 show was Chelsea's centenary — a hundred years since the first show opened in the grounds of the Royal Hospital on a May morning in 1913. The RHS marked the occasion with a programme of particular ambition, and the show itself delivered some extraordinary gardens.

Roger Platts's M&G Centenary Garden won gold in a show that was notable for some sharp debate between designers and judges — the kind of vigorous critical conversation that Chelsea at its best always generates. Christopher Bradley-Hole returned to the Main Avenue after an eight-year absence with a Telegraph Garden that was deeply considered and intellectually challenging: an abstract interpretation of the English landscape in which woodland, hedgerows, fields and streams had been distilled into a grid of squares and rectangles, drawing on the designer's long study of Japanese Zen garden aesthetics while remaining rooted in the specifics of the British countryside.

Bradley-Hole had used his absence to deepen his thinking about what a garden could be, and the 2013 show revealed the results: a composition pared down to its essentials, in which the bones of the landscape — the ancient patterns of enclosure and clearance, field and hedge — were rendered in abstract geometric form. The star plants included oak, yew, box, hazel and beech, species so familiar in the British landscape as to seem ordinary but rendered here with a clarity that made them appear freshly seen.

The centenary year also prompted broader reflection on what Chelsea had meant to British gardening culture over the preceding hundred years: the trends it had launched, the plants it had popularised, the designers it had made famous and the debates it had catalysed. From the alpine rock gardens of 1913 to the naturalistic planting revolutions of the 2000s, the show had tracked and in many cases initiated the great shifts in how British people conceived of and related to their gardens.

2014: Hugo Bugg and the Waterscape Garden

The 2014 show produced a Best in Show winner that combined environmental advocacy with outstanding design in a way that pointed towards Chelsea's increasingly explicit engagement with issues of ecological responsibility.

Hugo Bugg's RBC Waterscape Garden — created when Bugg was just twenty-seven years old, making him one of the youngest designers to win a gold medal at the show — had at its core a powerful message about the global need for storm water management. The language of environmentalism was not new at Chelsea, but Bugg managed something that is extremely difficult: he made the message beautiful. Rather than simply illustrating a problem, he created a garden in which the management of water became a source of aesthetic pleasure.

A sequence of geometric platforms and walkways led visitors over and beside water, which was slowed and retained by areas of moisture-loving plants in shades of blue, lime green, white and yellow. The most dramatic element was a ravine of irises — tall, proud-stemmed plants whose natural habitat is exactly the kind of waterside zone that good storm water management seeks to create. The garden was both contemporary and stunningly beautiful, and it made a complex environmental argument with none of the heaviness that such arguments can acquire when handled less skilfully.

Bugg's success at such a young age was part of a deliberate effort by the RHS in this period to encourage younger designers to compete at the show. The sense that Chelsea needed to refresh its pool of talent — to avoid becoming a closed circle of established names — had been growing for some time, and the emergence of designers like Bugg validated that strategy handsomely.

Dan Pearson and the Chatsworth Garden: 2015

Dan Pearson had been one of the great presences in British garden design since his Chelsea debut in the 1990s, but his 2015 Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden was widely regarded as the purest expression of his particular genius — and it won Best in Show to no one's surprise and everyone's delight.

The garden was a representation of a less-visited part of the hundred-and-five-acre Chatsworth garden, in Derbyshire — specifically, the ornamental Trout Stream and the area around Paxton's rockery. In line with Pearson's deep commitment to naturalism and what he calls 'the wilder side of gardening', the garden captured the feeling of a place that nature and human stewardship had shaped together over centuries, where the line between the designed and the found is deliberately blurred.

Pearson's plant knowledge is extraordinary. His gardens at Chelsea have consistently featured combinations of species from contrasting wild habitats — prairie, woodland, wetland, mountain — assembled with an ecological sensitivity that makes them feel genuinely alive rather than merely composed. The Chatsworth garden was no exception. It read as an almost perfect piece of naturalism, and yet every element had been precisely chosen and placed. The skill lay in making the craft invisible.

The garden prompted a debate that has recurred at Chelsea many times since: what is a garden, exactly, if it so closely resembles nature that it requires a trained eye to detect the designer's hand? Pearson has always been content to inhabit this ambiguity. For him, the garden is a conversation between human aspiration and natural process, and the finest gardens are those in which neither voice dominates.

In the same year, James Basson created his first Chelsea garden for L'Occitane — a Provençal landscape of extraordinary richness and detail, with red earth paths winding through herby scented plants to a simple metal table and chairs beneath mature olive trees. Wildflowers surrounded this scene, and a man-made rill carried the sound of trickling water through the space. It was the kind of garden that made visitors feel that they had been genuinely transported to a specific place and time — southern France, in the heat of a summer afternoon — and the sensation was both joyful and slightly melancholy in the best possible way.

Andy Sturgeon Returns: 2016

Andy Sturgeon had already proven himself at Chelsea with his 2010 Best in Show. His 2016 return with the Telegraph Garden produced what many consider his finest work at the show — a garden that earned the top prize by combining everything he does best with an unusually generous spatial conception.

The garden was inspired by ancient volcanic geology — specifically the kind of dramatic landscape created by magma cooled and broken into extraordinary angular formations. A pathway of sawn limestone blocks, set at varying angles to one another, led through a rocky terrain covered with wiry, bushy plants in shades of grey and green, the palette punctuated by the burnt orange of Isoplexis canariensis — a canary island foxglove with tubular flowers of an almost startling intensity. At the far end of the garden, a fire basket glowed, and behind it a shadowplay backdrop of bronze fins created a theatrical effect that was, somehow, simultaneously dramatic and entirely controlled.

The planting was sourced from plants found in similar natural habitats around the world — the Southern Cape, the Mediterranean maquis, Californian chaparral, Chilean matorral — assembled to create a planting scheme that had genuine ecological coherence. Many of the specimens had not been seen before at Chelsea, and the freshness of the plant palette was one of the great talking points of the show. Sturgeon has always been adventurous in his plant choices, willing to go beyond the established Chelsea repertoire to find species that have genuine ornamental potential but have not yet been widely used.

The same year was notable for a non-competitive exhibit that nevertheless captured enormous public attention: the installation of nearly three hundred thousand individually crocheted poppies, covering almost two thousand square metres, created by designer Philip Johnson in collaboration with the 5000 Poppies Project. Each poppy had been made by a different contributor — more than fifty thousand in total — and the combined effect was one of the most moving memorial displays the show has ever seen. Chelsea has always been a place where horticulture and human meaning intertwine, and the poppy installation was an extreme expression of that quality.

2017: James Basson Wins with the Scent of Provence

James Basson's second Chelsea garden for L'Occitane, in 2017, took the Best in Show prize in a year that many observers described as one of the most impressive shows of the decade. Where his 2015 garden had been intimate and sensory — a deliberately reduced scale that invited close contemplation — the 2017 iteration expanded its ambitions to create what was essentially a full evocation of a Provençal wild landscape, one that felt genuinely unhuman in the best possible sense.

Basson's approach — replicating wild environments with botanical precision — had its precedent in the American garden tradition represented at Chelsea as far back as Minnie Hoyt in 1929, but the skill with which he assembled his Mediterranean scene was something new. Every plant in the garden had been sourced from the same climatic region. Every stone, every soil composition, every element of hard landscaping had been chosen to reflect the specific ecology of Provence. The result was a space that felt not designed but found — as if a piece of actual southern France had been carefully lifted and set down in the grounds of the Royal Hospital.

Critics who wondered whether such an approach truly qualified as garden design were answered by the overwhelming emotional response of those who experienced it. A garden that makes you feel, for even a moment, that you have left London and arrived somewhere else entirely — that you can smell thyme and lavender on a warm breeze, hear the hum of bees, feel the heat of a summer sun — is achieving something that no amount of technical skill alone can accomplish. Basson's garden did this, and the Best in Show award was widely applauded.

The 2017 show also saw water emerge as a dominant design theme. Copper made a strong appearance in the material choices of several gardens, and the use of geometric textured walls continued to evolve. The general quality of the show gardens that year was considered exceptionally high, which made the judging particularly difficult — one of those years when the Best in Show decision must have seemed, to anyone outside the judging room, almost impossibly hard.

2018: The Yorkshire Garden and Mark Gregory's Canal

The 2018 Chelsea Flower Show produced a Best in Show winner that became one of the most popular gardens the show had seen in many years — a garden that was subsequently voted by the public as the Garden of the Decade.

Mark Gregory, a Yorkshireman whose work has consistently celebrated the landscape and character of his home county, created a cottage garden featuring dry stone walls, a bothy — the simple stone shelter familiar from the northern uplands — and a flower meadow that captured the spirit of the Yorkshire Dales with evident love and considerable technical skill. The garden was full of the plants of the traditional English countryside: wildflowers, grasses, hedgerow species, the kind of planting that has been slowly returning to favour as naturalistic aesthetics have reshaped what British gardeners value.

What made the garden exceptional was not a single showstopping element but its integrity as a whole. Every detail — the coursing of the dry stone walls, the selection of the meadow seed mix, the patina of the bothy stonework — reflected a deep familiarity with the landscape being evoked. Gregory was not recreating a generic rural idyll but a specific place, rooted in a specific tradition, and the result was a garden of genuine authenticity in a show where authenticity is sometimes harder to achieve than spectacle.

When the public subsequently voted the garden their favourite of the entire decade, it confirmed what many had sensed at the show itself: that Gregory had created something that connected with people at a level beyond the merely aesthetic. In a period of social and political turbulence, the Yorkshire garden's unassuming steadiness — its suggestion that the simple pleasures of landscape, craft and plant life remain valid and nourishing — struck an emotional chord that was widely felt.

2019: Andy Sturgeon Wins Again, and the Princess of Wales's Garden

The 2019 show was one of the most talked-about in recent memory, for two reasons that had very different kinds of significance.

Andy Sturgeon won his second Best in Show award with the M&G Garden — an exceptionally accomplished piece of design inspired by ancient geology and the landscapes of the Mediterranean Basin, with planting drawn from similar wild habitats around the world. The garden was bold and confident, bearing all the hallmarks of Sturgeon at his very best: dramatic hard landscaping, adventurous planting, a clear conceptual framework executed without compromise.

But the garden that arguably attracted the greatest public attention was not the Best in Show winner. The Back to Nature Garden, co-designed by Catherine, the then Duchess of Cambridge, with Andrée Davies and Adam White, was a celebration of the healing power of natural environments and the importance of outdoor play for children. Featuring a tree house, waterfall, rustic den and campfire, it was a garden rooted in a deeply personal philosophy about child development and the relationship between young people and the natural world. The Duchess's involvement was genuine — she had worked with the design team throughout the creative process — and the garden reflected real conviction about why gardens and wild spaces matter.

The Back to Nature Garden won a gold medal and was subsequently recreated at RHS Garden Wisley, where it continued its original mission of demonstrating how outdoor environments can be designed to encourage children to engage with nature. Its broader cultural significance lay in confirming that the Chelsea Flower Show had become a place where ideas about wellbeing, mental health, education and environmental connection could be expressed alongside purely aesthetic achievement.

Also in 2019, Mark Gregory created a second Yorkshire garden — this time featuring a fully functioning canal lock, inspired by the canals and waterways of the West Riding — that won the People's Choice Award and continued to develop his reputation as one of the most popular designers working at the show.

2020: Virtual Chelsea and a Year Without a Show

The 2020 Chelsea Flower Show was an early casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. The RHS made the decision to cancel the May show — the first time Chelsea had been cancelled since the Second World War — and to replace it with a virtual event, presented online. Designers shared tours of gardens that might have been, and demonstrations and discussions were posted on digital platforms.

The absence of the physical show created a strange grief among those who look forward to it each year. Chelsea is not simply a horticultural event; it is a fixture in the national life, a marker of the season, a gathering place for a community of gardeners and garden lovers that stretches across the country and around the world. Its absence was felt acutely, and the virtual replacement, however valiant an effort, could not replicate the experience of standing on Main Avenue with the smell of bruised grass and exhibition roses in the air.

In a touching acknowledgement of the show's interrupted history, the RHS ran an online campaign celebrating the Garden of the Decade — the public vote that eventually named Mark Gregory's 2018 Yorkshire garden as the people's favourite from the previous ten years. The exercise was both a celebration of past achievement and a reminder of what the show, and the broader gardening community, was missing.

2021: Chelsea Returns in September

The 2021 show marked Chelsea's triumphant return, but in an entirely different form: moved from its usual May slot to September, to allow the pandemic situation to stabilise sufficiently for a physical show to be held safely. The Autumn Chelsea — as it was inevitably nicknamed — was a different experience in several ways, not least because the plants in bloom were the plants of late summer and early autumn rather than the spring-season species that Chelsea traditionally celebrates.

The shift in season required designers to think about their planting in entirely new ways. The roses, alliums, irises and peonies that are the traditional stars of a May Chelsea were replaced by late-season perennials, asters, sedums, grasses gone to tawny autumn gold and dahlias in their full glory. Some designers found the enforced creativity liberating; others found it a significant challenge.

The 2021 show demonstrated, if any further demonstration was needed, the extraordinary adaptability of the Chelsea community. Designers, nurseries, sponsors and the RHS itself had worked under conditions of great uncertainty to produce a show that, while different in atmosphere from any previous Chelsea, was unmistakably itself in its ambition, its quality and its celebratory spirit. The delight of returning to the grounds of the Royal Hospital after more than a year's absence was palpable.

2022: Rewilding Britain and a New Aesthetic

The 2022 show saw Chelsea return to its traditional May slot with a new RHS Director General, Clare Matterson, presiding over a show that felt, to many observers, like a genuine turning point in the aesthetic direction of the event.

The Best in Show award went to A Rewilding Britain Landscape Garden, designed by Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt — a garden that wore its ecological convictions very clearly on its sleeves, or rather on its planting, which embraced the principles of rewilding with considerable boldness. The garden made a case for allowing natural processes to reassert themselves in the landscape, for retreating from intensive management and allowing the ecology of a place to find its own equilibrium.

The RHS judges described the experience of choosing this garden as one of the most fiercely contested decisions in recent memory. In the end, they said, all the judges were captivated by the skill, endeavour and charm of the garden — what they described as its exquisite quality at every step. It was a garden that managed to be both a design statement and a genuine piece of horticultural advocacy, making its argument not through text or signage but through the plants themselves: the native species, the allowed weeds, the spaces deliberately left for nature to fill.

The 2022 show also featured significant moments of royal commemoration. A garden was created to mark the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, featuring laser-cut steel silhouettes of the monarch surrounded by seventy planted terracotta pots planted with lily of the valley — the Queen's favourite flower. It was a tender and dignified tribute that captured something of the complex affection with which the nation regarded its longest-serving monarch.

2023: Horatio's Garden and the Year of Weeds

The 2023 show returned in May to a Chelsea that was in reflective mood. King Charles III and Queen Camilla attended, viewing a special display that paid tribute to the life of Queen Elizabeth II and celebrated their own coronation. Catherine, the Princess of Wales, hosted the first children's picnic at a newly created garden, inviting pupils from ten schools participating in the RHS's school gardening campaign.

The Best in Show award went to Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg's Horatio's Garden — a deeply meaningful garden that drew its inspiration and its purpose from the Horatio's Garden charity, which creates and maintains beautiful spaces within NHS spinal injury centres around the country. The garden was both beautiful and emotionally charged, its design reflecting the specific needs of people living with life-altering physical injuries while refusing to reduce itself to mere functionality.

Harris and Bugg created a space of genuine grace: a garden in which the qualities of peace, beauty and natural abundance that are so healing for people in difficult circumstances were expressed with sensitivity and horticultural skill. The planting was rich and generous, including late-season perennials that created a sense of abundance without busyness. The structural elements — paths, seating, shade — were designed with the particular requirements of wheelchair users in mind, but so naturally integrated into the overall design that they read simply as good garden design rather than as accessible design per se.

The 2023 show was also notable for an embrace of plants that had previously been banned from polite horticultural company. Weeds — or rather, the plants that convention had designated as weeds — were a big talking point. Several show gardens made a deliberate feature of dandelions, thistles and other spontaneous volunteers, arguing through their planting that the category of 'weed' is culturally constructed rather than botanically meaningful. Cleve West's Centrepoint Garden, Sarah Price's Nurture Landscapes Garden and Jihae Hwang's garden for the Hoban Cultural Foundation were among those that explored this territory with intelligence and courage.

Sarah Price's Nurture Landscapes Garden was described by admirers as possibly her most painterly work. Inspired by the paintings and gardening sensibility of Cedric Morris — the great twentieth-century artist and plant collector who established the Benton End garden in Suffolk and whose influence on a generation of gardeners cannot be overstated — it was a celebration of Morris's extraordinary Benton irises and of the natural materials with which he worked. Price is one of the most gifted planters working in Britain today, and the garden demonstrated why: every combination of species felt simultaneously inevitable and surprising, each plant perfectly chosen for its relationship to its neighbours.

Cleve West's Centrepoint Garden, meanwhile, showed a designer at his most provocative and most honest. The garden featured the ruins of a house, alongside rubble, a fallen tree, extensive self-seeding plants and what many gardens would simply call weeds — including dandelions grown to full ornamental maturity. It was a compassionate statement about homelessness and about the way that nature asserts itself even in the most difficult human circumstances. That it also managed to be genuinely beautiful confirmed West's status as one of the most important designers Chelsea has produced.

2024: Ula Maria and the Forest Bathing Garden

The 2024 show brought to Main Avenue a garden that seemed to capture, with perfect timing, a growing cultural conversation about the relationship between mental health, nature and the act of simply being present in a landscape.

Ula Maria's Muscular Dystrophy UK Forest Bathing Garden won Best in Show with a concept rooted in the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku — forest bathing, the therapeutic practice of slow, deliberate immersion in woodland environments that has accumulated a substantial body of scientific evidence behind it. The garden was inspired by the atmosphere of a birch grove: tranquil, dappled, gently enclosed and deeply quiet.

To achieve this, Maria incorporated more than fifty trees into a relatively compact space, underplanting them with the shade-loving species that naturally colonise woodland floors: epimediums, hardy geraniums, wild strawberries and foxgloves. The effect was of stepping out of the crowded bustle of the showground and into a different world — cooler, softer, more capacious in its quietude.

The garden's connection to Muscular Dystrophy UK gave it an additional resonance. The therapeutic qualities of natural environments for people living with neuromuscular conditions — many of whom face significant mobility challenges that limit their access to outdoor spaces — were at the heart of the garden's purpose, and the design reflected this in its generous pathways and thoughtfully considered transitions. But the advocacy was worn lightly; the garden succeeded first and foremost as a beautiful, profoundly calming space.

Tom Stuart-Smith returned to Chelsea in 2024 after a period of distance from the competitive arena, creating a National Garden Scheme Garden that had a woodland feel and featured many plants donated by National Garden Scheme garden owners. It was a gracious, considered piece of work, and its gold medal confirmed that Stuart-Smith remains one of the most accomplished designers the show has produced.

The WaterAid Garden, designed by Tom Massey and Je Ahn, also won gold with a water-wise design that addressed the increasingly urgent question of how gardens can be created and maintained in a climate that is becoming both more variable and more extreme. Massey's guidance to gardeners — choose drought-tolerant plants, harvest rainwater, choose permeable surfaces — was delivered through a garden of genuine beauty, demonstrating that responsible water use need not mean sacrificing aesthetic pleasure.

2025: Kazuyuki Ishihara and the Japanese Tea Garden

The 2025 Chelsea Flower Show produced a Best in Show winner that felt, to those who witnessed it, like a moment of crystalline perfection — a garden so complete in its vision, so precise in its execution and so moving in its effect that the judging panel's decision provoked immediate and widespread agreement.

Kazuyuki Ishihara's Cha No Niwa — Japanese Tea Garden — was his thirteenth gold medal at Chelsea, a record in itself. Ishihara has been competing at the show for decades, and each garden he creates is an expression of Japanese garden philosophy brought into contact with the particular demands of the Chelsea showground. But the 2025 garden was widely regarded as his masterpiece.

The design was influenced by the traditional Japanese art of ikebana — the practice of flower arranging that seeks not simply to arrange cut flowers but to create a living composition in which every element communicates meaning. The theme was communication and harmony, and the garden achieved both these qualities with a depth that was immediately felt even by visitors unfamiliar with the philosophical tradition from which it emerged.

The planting included trees commonly found in the Japanese countryside: Acer palmatum 'Inaba-shidare', Acer palmatum f. polymorphum, hornbeam and Cornus florida, as well as perennials including the delightfully named Iris 'Flight of Butterflies'. The placement and pruning of every element had been calculated to create space — not emptiness but what the Japanese call 'ma', the meaningful gap that gives the surrounding elements their significance. The stones, shaped and positioned with extraordinary care, interacted with the plants in ways that required extended contemplation to fully appreciate.

'Instead of adding lots of plants, I use a small amount and keep them pruned to create space. This is my signature style,' Ishihara told the television cameras. Unlike many of the gardens at Chelsea that year — which were characterised by abundant, exuberant colour — his garden demonstrated the power of restraint, of knowing what to leave out. Even the unseen back of the garden, invisible to visitors, was as immaculately finished as the parts on display — a detail that spoke volumes about Ishihara's philosophy.

When the award was announced, Ishihara's response was characteristically joyful: he cheered, hugged his fellow designers and lost his trademark hat in the commotion. 'Every time I come here, I think I will never come back again,' he admitted. 'When I come back I see familiar faces and all the visitors are very complimentary. I like to see the work of other designers and I can keep learning from them. I'm addicted to Chelsea. I feel like Chelsea is my life itself.'

His son, Jun Ishihara, also created a garden at the 2025 show — the first time father and son had competed at Chelsea simultaneously. The generational aspect of this moment resonated with many observers: the sense of a tradition being passed on, of a body of knowledge and passion transmitted from one generation to the next.

The 2025 show also included a garden designed by Monty Don — the most famous face in British television gardening — making his debut as a show garden designer with a garden designed for dogs and their humans. Featuring clever dog-inspired planting and an educational section highlighting plants toxic to dogs, it was an endearing expression of the unashamedly playful side of Chelsea, and of the show's capacity to contain multitudes: the profound and the lighthearted, the forensically competitive and the joyfully generous, the avant-garde and the gently traditional.

The Designers Who Have Shaped Chelsea

To understand Chelsea's winners is to understand the careers of the extraordinary individuals who have competed there. A few stand out as figures who have, over decades, defined what the show can be.

Tom Stuart-Smith is perhaps the most quietly influential British designer of his generation. His Chelsea gardens — from the Corten steel drama of 2006 through to the woodland grace of his 2024 return — have consistently demonstrated an ability to think simultaneously at the level of the individual plant and the composed landscape. His teaching, mentoring and writing have extended his influence far beyond the showground, and the many designers who cite him as an inspiration attest to his significance.

Cleve West's Chelsea record — gold medals in 2006 and 2008, consecutive Best in Shows in 2011 and 2012, golds in 2014, 2016 and 2023 — speaks for itself, but numbers do not capture the quality of his engagement with the show. West is a designer who takes genuine risks: his gardens frequently challenge the conventions of what Chelsea show gardens are supposed to look like, and they have done so with a consistency that has earned him both the respect of his peers and the devotion of a large following among the gardening public.

Andy Sturgeon, with Best in Show awards in 2010, 2016 and 2019, is one of the show's great serial successes. His particular combination of bold structural thinking and adventurous, habitat-driven planting has proved remarkably durable — capable of producing fresh and surprising results year after year without ever feeling formulaic.

Dan Pearson's influence on how naturalistic planting is understood and practised in Britain is incalculable. His Chelsea work, culminating in the extraordinary Chatsworth garden of 2015, has provided both inspiration and a kind of permission for a generation of designers who want to move beyond the conventions of the traditional herbaceous border towards something more ecologically grounded.

Sarah Eberle, as the most decorated designer in the show's history, occupies a particular place in Chelsea's story. Her willingness to work with concepts that might have seemed absurd in the hands of a lesser designer — astronauts on Mars, geological time, sustainable building materials — and to realise those concepts with genuine horticultural authority, is a rare quality. Her career at Chelsea is a reminder that the show at its best rewards genuine imagination as well as technical mastery.

Kazuyuki Ishihara, whose thirteen gold medals and 2025 Best in Show represent a lifetime's commitment to bringing Japanese garden philosophy into conversation with the Chelsea context, embodies a quality that the show has sometimes struggled to fully appreciate: the value of a genuinely different cultural perspective on what a garden is and can be. His gardens are not simply beautiful; they are philosophical statements, expressions of a tradition of garden-making that predates Western formal gardening by centuries and has developed its own language, its own values and its own aesthetic standards. That he has found in Chelsea a stage large enough to express this tradition is one of the show's great achievements.

The Trends That Chelsea Has Made

To read Chelsea's winners is to read a history of gardening taste in Britain and beyond. The show has not merely reflected trends; it has created them, amplifying and legitimising movements in design and planting that might otherwise have taken much longer to reach a broad audience.

The rehabilitation of Corten steel as a garden material — legitimised by Tom Stuart-Smith's extraordinary 2006 garden — changed the aesthetic vocabulary of the designed garden in Britain. Before that garden, rusted steel was an industrial material. Afterwards, it became a garden material with a specific aesthetic identity: warm, honest, willing to age gracefully. The material is now ubiquitous in designed gardens of all scales.

The naturalistic planting movement — associated with Piet Oudolf, Dan Pearson and a generation of designers influenced by them — found one of its most powerful early expressions at Chelsea. The show's audiences, exposed to the extraordinary beauty of prairie grasses and bold perennial combinations, began to ask their nurseries and garden centres for species that had never previously been considered commercially viable. Within a decade, plants like Echinacea, Sanguisorba, Molinia and Deschampsia had moved from the specialist nurseryman's catalogue to the high street garden centre.

The integration of environmental and social messages into Chelsea show gardens — a trend that has accelerated markedly in the twenty-first century — has helped to establish the idea that a garden can be both beautiful and meaningful in an explicitly public sense. Gardens for charities, gardens addressing climate change, gardens celebrating biodiversity, gardens advocating for the rights of disabled people, gardens exploring the therapeutic potential of green spaces: Chelsea has given all of these a platform and, by awarding them gold medals and Best in Show prizes, has confirmed that aesthetic quality and moral purpose are not in conflict.

The wellbeing garden — the garden conceived explicitly as a healing or therapeutic environment — has become one of the most significant categories of contemporary Chelsea garden design. From the early gardens for people with arthritis or cancer, through Ula Maria's forest bathing garden of 2024 and Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg's Horatio's Garden of 2023, Chelsea has tracked and amplified the growing scientific understanding of the relationship between natural environments and human health.

What Makes a Chelsea Best in Show?

After more than a century of competition, is there a formula for Chelsea Best in Show? The judges, rightly, insist that there is not — that each garden must be judged on its own terms and that the criteria change as the design world evolves. But patterns emerge when you survey the winners across the decades.

The Best in Show garden almost always has a clear conceptual identity — an idea at its core that gives the design coherence and gives visitors something to take away beyond a collection of beautiful plants. Tom Stuart-Smith's geological drama, Cleve West's Roman ruins, Sarah Eberle's Martian landscape, Dan Pearson's Chatsworth trout stream, Ula Maria's birch grove: in every case, there is an animating idea that gives the garden its particular character.

The Best in Show garden also almost always succeeds at the level of the individual plant. Among the most celebrated Chelsea designers, there is a shared quality of extraordinary botanical knowledge — an ability to recognise which plant will do exactly what is needed in exactly the right conditions. This is not simply a matter of plant collecting or of knowing a large number of species; it is a kind of botanical empathy, an understanding of what plants are and what they need, that makes the difference between a garden that looks good on press day and one that looks even better by Saturday.

The Best in Show garden has to work emotionally. The judges talk about a garden that you want to step into, that has what they call soul or spirit — a quality that is extremely difficult to define but instantly recognisable. Some of the most technically accomplished gardens at Chelsea have failed to capture the top prize because they lacked this quality: they were correct and admirable, but not moving. The winners are always, in some sense, moving.

And the Best in Show garden is almost always asking a question about what gardens are for — placing itself within the larger conversation that Chelsea has always hosted. Whether it is asking about the relationship between the designed and the natural, about the cultural roots from which garden-making grows, about the social and therapeutic functions of green space, about the ecological responsibilities of the gardener in a warming world: the best gardens are never merely decorative. They are arguments, made in the language of plants and stone and water.

The Royal Hospital: A Setting Like No Other

It is worth pausing to consider the extraordinary setting in which Chelsea's dramas unfold. The grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea — Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece of late seventeenth-century architecture, home to the famous Chelsea Pensioners in their scarlet coats — provide a backdrop that no purpose-built show venue could replicate.

The hospital's gardens, running down to the Embankment, are themselves a piece of designed landscape of considerable historical significance. Their formality — the great lawns, the radiating avenues, the carefully managed views — contrasts magnificently with the exuberant informality of the show gardens ranged along Main Avenue, creating a productive tension that gives the whole event a particular quality of place.

The Chelsea Pensioners themselves — veterans of the British armed forces who live in the hospital under a form of sheltered community care established by King Charles II in 1682 — have always been a beloved presence at the show, moving through the crowds in their distinctive uniforms, generous in their engagement with visitors and clearly deriving genuine pleasure from the annual transformation of their home. The 2025 show included a garden designed specifically for the Chelsea Pensioners, providing a space for reflection and community within the grounds of the hospital itself.

Royal patronage has attended Chelsea since its earliest years. Queen Elizabeth II was a faithful visitor, and her deep and genuine enthusiasm for the show was apparent to all who encountered her there. King Charles III has brought to Chelsea the particular engagement of a man who has spent decades thinking seriously about the relationship between landscape, ecology and human wellbeing, and who has practical experience of both farming and garden design at Highgrove. Queen Camilla and Catherine, Princess of Wales have both been visible and engaged presences at recent shows.

The sense that Chelsea has royal approval — not merely ceremonial endorsement but genuine enthusiasm from individuals who garden and who understand why gardens matter — has always been part of what makes the show feel important beyond the horticultural world. It places gardens in a different category: not a hobby or a luxury but a serious human pursuit with cultural significance.

Chelsea and the Wider Gardening World

Chelsea's influence extends far beyond the show itself. The plants that receive the Chelsea spotlight — as individual plants highlighted in show gardens, or as new introductions launched by nurseries in the Great Pavilion — frequently go on to transform what is available in the wider market.

The concept of the 'Chelsea plant' — the species or cultivar that captures the imagination of show visitors and then appears in nursery catalogues and garden centres within months — is a real phenomenon. Beth Chatto, whose extraordinary displays in the Great Pavilion established her reputation as one of the most innovative horticulturalists of the twentieth century, was a pioneer in demonstrating that plants from challenging growing conditions — dry shade, poor soil, drought-prone gravel — could be both beautiful and commercially viable. Her Chelsea work contributed directly to the revolution in ecological planting that characterised the latter decades of her long career.

The influence of Chelsea's show garden aesthetic on domestic garden design is equally significant. Research consistently shows that show garden visitors are inspired to make changes in their own gardens — to experiment with new plants, to try different materials, to reconsider the structure or the purpose of their outdoor spaces. The show does not merely display a vision of what gardens can be; it transmits that vision into millions of actual gardens across the country.

The international dimension of Chelsea's influence has grown substantially in the twenty-first century. Gardens representing countries from Japan to New Zealand, from Australia to South Africa, have appeared at Chelsea and found enthusiastic audiences. Kazuyuki Ishihara's repeated Chelsea successes have introduced Japanese garden philosophy to an enormous audience that might otherwise have encountered it only at specialist venues. The result is a genuine cultural exchange — a conversation between different garden-making traditions that enriches everyone involved.

The Plants of Chelsea: Stars of the Show

Behind every Best in Show garden is a collection of plants chosen with extraordinary care. The botanical knowledge required to assemble a Chelsea show garden — to select species that will be simultaneously at peak ornamental interest during the show week, that will thrive in the particular microclimate of the site and that will combine with other species in aesthetically and ecologically coherent ways — is immense.

Some plants have become closely associated with particular Chelsea moments. Dianthus cruentus — the velvet-red alpine pink that Cleve West used in his 2011 Best in Show garden — remains a talking point years later, its extraordinary saturated colour and its graceful habit having been unknown to most Chelsea visitors before West deployed it. Cenolophium denudatum, the elegant white umbellifer that Tom Stuart-Smith used in his 2008 Laurent-Perrier Garden, is another plant whose Chelsea reputation preceded its wider availability.

The tradition of Chelsea plant launches — nurseries using the show as the occasion to introduce new cultivars or to bring obscure species to a mainstream audience — has produced some of the best-loved plants of the past few decades. Rose varieties have long been launched at Chelsea, and the names of the new introductions often reflect the show's cultural significance: cultivars named for famous visitors, for charitable causes, for events of national importance.

The Great Pavilion — successor to the Great Marquee that for decades was the largest tent in the world — houses the competitive floral displays that run alongside the show gardens. Here, nurseries and botanical institutions assemble exhibits that demonstrate the full range of horticultural excellence: the extraordinary diversity of orchids, the cultivated perfection of dahlias, the structural drama of ferns, the intimate beauty of alpines. These displays are judged separately from the show gardens, with their own categories and awards, and they attract visitors of intense botanical knowledge and enthusiasm who may pass the show gardens by entirely to spend their time with the specialist exhibits.

Hillier Nurseries, with seventy-four consecutive gold medals until 2019, represents one of the extraordinary sustained achievements of Chelsea exhibiting. Their comprehensive, encyclopaedic displays of trees and shrubs have educated generations of gardeners in the extraordinary diversity of woody plants available in British horticulture. The loss of their continuous record of golds was felt by many as the passing of an era, though the quality of their subsequent exhibits has remained extremely high.

Chelsea's Social Conscience: Gardens with a Purpose

One of the most striking developments in twenty-first century Chelsea has been the emergence of gardens with explicit social or charitable purposes. This is not entirely new — the 1967 garden for disabled visitors was a pioneer in this space — but the scale and ambition of such gardens has grown substantially in recent years.

Horatio's Garden — the charity that creates beautiful garden spaces in spinal injury centres throughout the NHS — has produced multiple Chelsea gardens, culminating in the Best in Show winner designed by Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg in 2023. The charity's founder, Horatio Chapple, was a young man who volunteered in a spinal injury centre and was struck by the absence of beautiful outdoor spaces. He was killed in a polar bear attack in 2011, at the age of seventeen, and the charity established in his memory has gone on to create some of the most moving show gardens of recent years.

WaterAid, Macmillan Cancer Support, the NSPCC, Muscular Dystrophy UK, the National Garden Scheme, Myeloma UK, Centrepoint and many other charities and causes have used Chelsea show gardens as a platform for advocacy and fundraising. The gardens they commission are often among the most emotionally resonant at the show, their creative briefs pushing designers towards territory that purely aesthetic commissioning might not reach.

The relationship between garden design and social care is one that Chelsea has done more than any other event to bring to public attention. Gardens as therapy, as rehabilitation, as community building, as mental health support: these ideas have moved from the margins to the mainstream of cultural discussion in Britain in recent years, and Chelsea's advocacy for them — implicit and explicit — has been a significant factor in that movement.

The Future of Chelsea: Looking Forward

As Chelsea moves through its second century, the questions that confront it are in some ways the same as they have always been and in other ways entirely new. The challenge of maintaining its extraordinary standards of excellence while also evolving to reflect a changing world is one that the RHS takes seriously and navigates with considerable care.

Climate change is perhaps the most pressing new variable. The plants that could reliably be assembled for a May Chelsea show are changing as the climate warms. Species that were once reliably hardy in south London are being pushed northward; species from warmer climates are becoming viable that were previously too tender. Chelsea's show gardens in recent years have increasingly reflected this: gardens exploring drought-tolerant planting, water management, urban heat islands and ecological resilience have become more common and more central.

The move towards greater ecological responsibility extends to the construction and dismantling of show gardens themselves. The amount of material involved in building even a single Main Avenue garden — the stone, the steel, the timber, the imported soil — is considerable, and the question of what happens to it all after the show closes has become an increasingly urgent conversation. The RHS has worked with designers and sponsors to increase the proportion of materials that are reused, relocated or recycled, and several recent winners have been notably thoughtful about the lifecycle of their materials.

The democratisation of garden design — the growing accessibility of horticultural education and the increasing diversity of the design community — is another positive development that Chelsea has begun to reflect. The show's history has been dominated by a relatively narrow demographic of designers, and the push to encourage younger, more diverse entrants is beginning to produce results. The inclusion of designers from different cultural backgrounds, working from different aesthetic traditions and different horticultural inheritances, enriches the show and ensures that it continues to reflect something more than a single national tradition.

The digital revolution has transformed how Chelsea's ideas reach their audience. Social media — particularly platforms that are image-centred — has made the show's aesthetic innovations available to a global audience within minutes of their public debut. A planting combination photographed in the first light of press morning can be replicated in gardens around the world within months. The acceleration of this cultural transmission is without precedent in the show's history, and its long-term effects on gardening culture are still being worked out.

A Show That Matters

The Chelsea Flower Show matters because gardens matter — and this is a truth that every winner of the Best in Show award, in their different ways, has affirmed and extended.

Gardens matter because they are places where human beings can be in productive, nourishing relationship with the living world. In an era of accelerating urbanisation and ecological crisis, this relationship has never been more important. The garden — even the smallest plot, even the window box on the tenth floor — is a point of contact between human life and natural process, a place where the rhythms of growth and decay, of season and change, can be felt and appreciated and attended to.

Chelsea's winners, year after year, have reminded their audiences that this contact is not a luxury but a necessity; that beauty in the natural world is not merely decorative but sustaining; that the act of growing plants, whether in a show garden on Main Avenue or in a pot on a doorstep, is an act of participation in something larger than ourselves.

John Wood's alpine garden in 1913, with its magnificent rock construction and its pair of borrowed goats, expressed, in the idiom of its time, the same fundamental conviction that Ula Maria's forest bathing garden expressed in 2024: that the natural world, encountered directly and with full attention, is a source of deep human good.

The more things change at Chelsea — the materials, the plants, the concepts, the cultural references, the social messages — the more this fundamental conviction endures. It is what the show is for. It is why the judges deliberate so carefully before awarding the gold and the Best in Show, and why the recipients of those awards feel the weight of what they have received. And it is why, every May, visitors continue to come to the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in their hundreds of thousands, to walk the paths between the show gardens and to feel — however fleetingly, however incompletely — what a great garden can do.

A Chronicle of Chelsea's Best in Show Winners: Key Milestones

The reinstatement of the Best Show Garden Award in 1991 marked the beginning of the modern era of Chelsea competition. From that point forward, the award has been contested with increasing seriousness and sophistication, and its recipients have defined the decades through which they have lived.

John Van Hage's win in 1991 established the principle that the award should go not merely to the most technically accomplished garden but to the one that combined excellence of execution with genuine originality of vision. Isabel and Julian Bannerman's mastery of mature planting in 1994 showed that ambition of scale was not incompatible with sensitivity of detail. Arabella Lennox-Boyd's 1998 Best in Show demonstrated that a strongly structured approach, built on a deep understanding of shrubs and evergreens, could be as moving as any more expressly naturalistic aesthetic.

The new millennium brought a succession of extraordinary winners: Cleve West's twin triumphs of 2011 and 2012 set a record that has not been equalled; Andy Sturgeon's three Best in Show awards across almost a decade showed the possibility of sustained excellence in a competition where even a single win is exceptional; Dan Pearson's 2015 Chatsworth garden anchored naturalistic planting firmly in the canon of Chelsea achievement; Sarah Eberle's record as the show's most decorated designer placed a bold, conceptually adventurous approach at the centre of Chelsea's identity.

In the 2020s, the pattern has shifted towards gardens whose explicit social and ecological purposefulness has become inseparable from their aesthetic achievement. The Best in Show winner is increasingly a garden that asks what the designed green space can do for people who are suffering, for communities that are struggling, for an ecology that is under pressure. The technical excellence that has always been required remains as important as ever, but it is now understood to be in the service of something larger than beauty for its own sake.

This evolution reflects changes in the broader culture, but it also reflects a deepening understanding within the garden design world of what gardens can be and what they can do. The designers who compete at Chelsea are increasingly aware of the extraordinary privilege they hold: the ability to create, in the space of a few weeks, a world that demonstrates possibilities — ecological, social, aesthetic, therapeutic — that might not otherwise be visible to the tens of thousands of people who walk through it.

That awareness is Chelsea's most valuable possession, and the guarantee that the show will continue to matter as long as it continues to hold it.

The Great Pavilion: Where Horticulture Lives in Detail

No account of Chelsea's winners would be complete without a tribute to the Great Pavilion — the enormous structure that replaced the legendary Great Marquee in 2002 and that houses the competitive floral and botanical exhibits at the heart of the show.

If the show gardens are Chelsea's most photographed and most discussed element, the Pavilion is its most botanically serious. Here, specialist nurseries and horticultural institutions assemble displays of extraordinary depth and beauty, demonstrating the full range of what skilled horticulturalists can achieve in specific plant families and genera.

The orchid displays that have appeared at Chelsea since the great show of 1960 remain extraordinary. The rose exhibits — which have included the world's finest nurseries, from Peter Beales with his twenty-nine gold medals across four decades to David Austin with his matchless collection of English roses — have done as much as anything to shape what the British gardening public thinks of and expects from the rose in the garden. The dahlia displays, which seem to grow in ambition and brilliance each year, represent the rehabilitation of a plant that was for a time considered unfashionable and has now reclaimed its rightful place in the front rank of British garden plants.

Alpine societies, fern enthusiasts, carnivorous plant specialists, begonia growers, orchid cultivators, hostas devotees: the Pavilion is the place where the deep specialist knowledge of the British horticultural community is on show in its fullest form. The gold medals awarded here are the product of years or decades of dedicated cultivation, of the patient accumulation of knowledge about what specific plants need and how they can best be grown. They are a different kind of achievement from the Best in Show awarded to the show gardens, but no less remarkable for that.

Beth Chatto's displays in the Pavilion over many decades were a different kind of achievement again: not simply beautiful collections of plants but arguments about how plants could be grown in difficult conditions, assembled with a designer's eye for composition and a plantswoman's depth of botanical knowledge. Her influence on British horticulture — specifically on the understanding that ecological planting, responsive to the specific conditions of a site, could produce results more beautiful and more lasting than any amount of amendments and interventions — was extended and amplified by each successive Chelsea appearance.

Carol Klein, who first gained a following through her displays at Chelsea before becoming one of Britain's most beloved television garden presenters, carried forward something of Chatto's spirit: the beautifully arranged display that was also a lesson in how plants can be grouped and how they relate to one another. Klein's Glebe Cottage Plants displays placed her, in the eyes of many who encountered them, in the tradition of the great plant-person exhibitors who have always been among Chelsea's most compelling figures.

Conclusion: The Living Archive

The Chelsea Flower Show is, among many other things, a living archive — a record, renewed and refreshed each year, of what the British relationship with gardens has been, is and might become.

To study its winners is to trace a history of taste and ambition, of technical mastery and conceptual daring, of individual genius and collective aspiration. From John Wood's gold-medal alpine garden of 1913 to Kazuyuki Ishihara's extraordinary Japanese Tea Garden of 2025, the show has hosted more than a century of extraordinary horticultural achievement, and each winner has added a chapter to a story that is still very much being written.

The story is not simply one of progress — of gardens getting better and better in some linear way. It is more interesting and more complex than that. It is a story of recurring themes and returning arguments; of ideas that appear, disappear and return transformed; of conversations between designers and their predecessors, between plants and their places, between the human desire to shape and control and the natural world's magnificent indifference to such desires.

What Chelsea's Best in Show winners share, across all the decades and all the different aesthetics and all the very different conceptions of what a great garden should be, is a quality of complete commitment to what they do. The designers who have won Chelsea's highest honour have all, in their own ways, believed utterly in the importance of what they were making — believed that a garden, made well and made honestly, is a contribution to the world that matters. That conviction, expressed differently each year, in each new garden, in each new combination of plants and stone and water and light, is Chelsea's most enduring gift to British gardening culture.

And as long as the show continues — as long as May brings its annual miracle of flowers and design and possibility to the grounds of the Royal Hospital — that gift will keep being given, and received, and passed on.

The Nurseries: Unsung Champions of Chelsea

To speak only of the show gardens when discussing Chelsea's winners is to tell half the story. The nurseries and specialist growers who exhibit in the Great Pavilion and across the showground represent a different kind of excellence — one sustained across decades rather than expressed in the compressed drama of a single show garden's creation.

Peter Beales Roses began exhibiting at Chelsea in the early 1970s, winning a bronze medal in 1973 and steadily improving their standard through the decade until they achieved their first gold medal in 1989. From that point, their record became extraordinary: twenty-nine gold medals across four decades, with a consistency that speaks to an unbroken commitment to the highest standards of rose cultivation and display. Each year, Beales's Chelsea exhibit serves not only as a showcase for their remarkable collection of old garden roses, shrub roses and climbing roses but as a launching pad for new varieties bred at their Norfolk nursery. The names chosen for new introductions often carry their own cultural weight — roses named for NHS workers, for local landmarks, for beloved patrons of the horticultural community.

The tradition of launching new rose varieties at Chelsea is one of the show's most reliable pleasures. David Austin's English Roses — the series of cultivars bred to combine the fragrance and flower form of old garden roses with the repeat-flowering habit of modern varieties — have been introduced to the public at Chelsea over several decades, and many of the most successful introductions have been first seen by the crowds pushing through the Pavilion doors on press morning. The excitement of a new Austin rose is a particular Chelsea experience: the sense of being present at the beginning of something that may, in five or ten years, be growing in tens of thousands of gardens.

Hillier Nurseries' Chelsea record of seventy-four consecutive gold medals — from 1946 to 2019 — is one of the most remarkable sustained achievements in the show's history. Their exhibits, always comprehensive and always botanically serious, have educated generations of gardeners in the extraordinary diversity of trees and shrubs available to British horticulture. Unusual species, heritage cultivars, plants of particular ornamental or botanical significance: a visit to the Hillier stand at Chelsea was for many years a masterclass in the woody plant, presented with the authority of a nursery that had been growing trees and shrubs since 1864. The end of that unbroken run of golds in 2019 was received by the horticultural community with something approaching grief.

The alpines — always one of Chelsea's most specialist pleasures — have their devoted exhibitors too. The Alpine Garden Society has maintained a presence at the show for many years, and the tiny, intricate beauties they display — plants that in the wild cling to rock faces thousands of metres above sea level and in cultivation require the most careful management of drainage, moisture and exposure — attract the most knowledgeable and passionate visitors. To pause at an alpine display is to be in the presence of horticultural obsession in its finest form: people who have spent years perfecting the art of growing plants that have no interest in being grown at all.

The orchid growers who exhibit at Chelsea occupy a similarly specialist position. From the great orchid display of 1960, which accompanied the Third World Orchid Conference, through to the spectacular contemporary exhibits that continue to astonish visitors with the improbable diversity of the orchid family, these displays have brought one of the world's largest plant families to an audience that might otherwise know it only through the Phalaenopsis on the supermarket shelf.

The Judges: The Invisible Architects of Chelsea's Story

The Chelsea winners are not chosen by a single authority but by a panel of judges whose expertise, perspectives and occasional disagreements shape the story of the show as profoundly as any designer's ambition.

The process of judging at Chelsea is both rigorous and intensely human. Judges visit the show gardens before they are opened to the public — walking through them, examining the planting at close quarters, discussing the design in detail and debating its merits and weaknesses with reference to a set of criteria that have evolved over the show's history. The criteria include horticultural excellence — the quality and condition of the plants, the skill with which they have been cultivated and combined — and design achievement: the clarity and originality of the concept, the quality of the hard landscaping, the effectiveness of the space as a whole.

But beyond these measurable qualities, the judges are looking for something that is harder to quantify: the quality of experience that the garden provides. Does it make you want to step into it? Does it move you? Does it have what the best Chelsea gardens always have — that quality of soul or spirit that makes the difference between a technically excellent garden and a genuinely great one?

James Alexander-Sinclair, one of the show's most experienced judges, has spoken candidly about the difficulty of the judging process in interviews with gardening publications. The challenge, he explains, is not usually in identifying which gardens deserve gold medals — that is often relatively clear — but in determining which among the gold-medal-worthy gardens deserves the singular distinction of Best in Show. In years when several gardens are of exceptional quality, the debate can be intense and prolonged, with judges who feel genuine conviction about different gardens needing to be brought to consensus through careful argument and re-evaluation.

The judging panel changes composition over time, but it is always drawn from practitioners and authorities with deep knowledge of both horticulture and design. Established designers, senior horticulturalists, plantspeople of long experience: the panel represents accumulated expertise in the two disciplines that Chelsea brings together, and the awards it gives carry authority precisely because of the seriousness with which its members approach their task.

Controversies have occurred. The 1993 award to Julie Toll's seaside garden generated significant debate, with voices in the design community arguing that the garden did not meet the fundamental requirements of designed outdoor space. More recently, gardens with strongly naturalistic aesthetics have occasionally provoked discussion about whether a planting that looks largely undirected can properly be credited to a designer's vision — a discussion that Piet Oudolf, Dan Pearson and their followers would answer with vigour.

The evolution of what Chelsea judges consider excellent is itself a reflection of the evolution of horticultural culture. In the early decades of the show, a garden that departed significantly from convention risked being overlooked however great its quality. As the decades passed and the design world expanded its understanding of what a garden could be, the range of approaches that could win gold — and eventually Best in Show — widened correspondingly. The willingness of judges in 2007 to give Best in Show to Sarah Eberle's Martian astronaut garden, and in 2022 to a rewilding landscape, speaks to a judging culture that has genuinely evolved.

The Sponsors: Invisible Partners in Chelsea's Story

Behind each show garden is a sponsor — an organisation, corporation, charity or institution that has provided the funding that makes the garden possible. Sponsorship at Chelsea is not passive: the relationship between a sponsor's brief and a designer's vision shapes every show garden that appears on Main Avenue, and the best partnerships produce gardens that express both the sponsor's values and the designer's artistry without sacrificing either.

The Daily Telegraph's long relationship with Chelsea — spanning many decades and producing some of the show's most celebrated gardens — is one of the great partnerships in the show's history. Tom Stuart-Smith's 2006 garden, Ulf Nordfjell's 2007 garden, Cleve West's 2011 Best in Show, Sarah Price's gold-medal 2012 garden: all were created under the Telegraph's sponsorship, and the newspaper's willingness to commission ambitious, design-led gardens with serious horticultural content rather than merely commercial displays contributed significantly to the quality of the show's central avenue.

Laurent-Perrier, the Champagne house, has sponsored a series of gardens over more than two decades that have included some of the most celebrated designs in Chelsea's recent history. Their relationship with Luciano Giubbilei, which produced the extraordinary 2011 garden with Kengo Kuma's bamboo pavilion, and with Dan Pearson, which culminated in the 2015 Chatsworth Best in Show, demonstrates how a consistent sponsorship relationship can enable a designer to develop a vision over multiple shows.

M&G Investments sponsored a series of gardens through the 2010s and 2020s that were consistently ambitious and frequently award-winning, including the centenary garden of 2013 and gardens by Andy Sturgeon and James Basson. The financial services sector has been an important presence in Chelsea sponsorship, drawn partly by the association with quality and prestige and partly by the show's remarkable ability to generate positive media coverage.

The RHS's own Project Giving Back initiative has brought charities and social enterprises into the sponsorship arena, enabling organisations that could not otherwise afford a Chelsea show garden to commission designs from established professionals. The result has been some of the most emotionally powerful gardens of recent years — including the gardens for Horatio's Garden, Muscular Dystrophy UK and Centrepoint that have won gold medals and Best in Show in the 2020s.

The economics of Chelsea show garden production are formidable. A Main Avenue show garden — typically a space of around two hundred and seventy square metres — can cost several hundred thousand pounds to design, build, plant, staff and insure, before the costs of any associated PR and events activity are considered. For a sponsor, this represents a significant investment, and the value they seek in return — brand association, media coverage, hospitality opportunities, staff engagement — requires careful management.

For the designers, the sponsor relationship is both enabling and constraining. A sponsor whose brief is closely aligned with the designer's own vision allows the creative work to flow freely; a brief that pulls in directions that the designer finds uncomfortable or inauthentic can make the work harder. The best Chelsea partnerships are those in which the sponsor trusts the designer's vision sufficiently to stand back, and the designer understands the sponsor's purposes sufficiently to serve them with genuine creativity.

The Plants That Chelsea Has Changed

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Chelsea's winners — beyond the careers of the designers themselves and the enduring influence of their design ideas — lies in the plants that have been brought to public attention and transformed from specialist obscurities into widely grown garden favourites.

The rehabilitation of ornamental grasses, which began hesitantly in British gardens in the 1980s and accelerated dramatically as the influence of Piet Oudolf, Dan Pearson and their contemporaries spread through the Chelsea audience, is one of the great plant revolutions of the late twentieth century. Where the traditional British garden treated grasses as lawn plants or weeds, Chelsea's most innovative designers showed that the family contains an extraordinary range of beautiful, structurally fascinating plants — Stipa, Molinia, Pennisetum, Deschampsia, Calamagrostis — that can transform a border or a designed landscape.

The Chelsea Plant of the Year award — introduced in 2012 — has provided a formal mechanism for recognising the most exciting new plants introduced at or associated with the show each year. The award has highlighted an extraordinary range of species and cultivars, from unusual vegetable varieties to refined alpine selections to exotic tender perennials newly made available to British growers. The winning plants reliably sell out of nurseries and garden centres in the months following the show, confirming Chelsea's extraordinary power to shape consumer demand.

The revival of the dahlia as a serious garden plant — after a period in the 1970s and 1980s when the genus was associated with the more unfashionable end of the plant world — is partly attributable to Chelsea. The show's dahlia displays, growing in ambition and artistry each year, have demonstrated that the dahlia family contains an almost infinite range of forms and colours, from the demure single-flowered varieties that look at home in a naturalistic planting to the gigantic dinner-plate decoratives that are simply breathtaking in their brazen scale.

The increasingly sophisticated use of foliage — the recognition that leaf colour, texture and form are as important in a designed composition as flower colour — has been one of Chelsea's most significant contributions to British gardening sensibility. Designers like Tom Stuart-Smith and Luciano Giubbilei, who build their gardens around a framework of carefully chosen foliage plants before considering the flowering element, have educated their audiences in how to see a garden in three dimensions over time rather than as a series of floral effects.

The introduction of plants from unfamiliar habitats — South African fynbos, Chilean matorral, North American prairie, Mediterranean garrigue — has transformed what many British gardeners consider possible in their own plots. Plants that were previously available only from specialist nurseries, or not at all, have been demonstrated in show gardens at Chelsea and subsequently made available through the nursery trade. The practical effect has been an extraordinary diversification of what appears in British gardens, with ecological implications that are almost uniformly positive: a greater range of plant species supports a greater range of invertebrate life, which supports in turn the birds and small mammals that make gardens genuinely ecologically valuable.

Chelsea and the Seasons: The May Show

There is a particular quality to Chelsea's timing that gives the show its horticultural character. The last week of May — the traditional slot, disrupted only by the 2021 autumn edition — falls at a moment in the gardening year that is both extremely promising and distinctly unpredictable.

By late May, the garden is in full early summer mode: the first flush of roses is either at its peak or about to achieve it, irises are blooming across their full extraordinary range, alliums are producing their structural globes of purple and white, peonies are opening their opulent flowers and the late-season spring bulbs — tulips in some years, depending on the date of the last frosts — are making their final appearance. The Chelsea designer must navigate this seasonal moment with great care, selecting plants whose performance will peak during the show week and coordinating their timing with the precision of a conductor managing a complex score.

Forcing and retarding techniques — bringing plants on faster or holding them back — are widely used by Chelsea exhibitors to ensure that their chosen specimens are in precisely the condition they need during the show week. Bulbs may be kept in cold storage to delay their emergence; tender plants may be brought under glass ahead of schedule to accelerate theirs. The sophisticated orchestration of plant material that goes into a Chelsea show garden or Pavilion display is itself a remarkable skill, one that requires years of experience with specific plants and growing conditions to master.

The Chelsea weather is famously unreliable. May in London can bring everything from unseasonably warm sunshine to cold, driving rain — and occasionally, as in 2011, a combination of both within the same week. Designers must ensure that their gardens can withstand whatever the weather brings while still looking their best for the judges who visit in the early morning and the public who follow through the day. Rain is particularly challenging for marquee displays, where the combination of humidity and variable temperature can distress delicate plant material rapidly. But rain is equally challenging for show gardens, whose soil and hard landscaping must be able to cope with downpours without the carefully tended planting being damaged.

Chelsea's weather has produced some memorable moments. The rain during the 1932 show was reportedly so severe that a summer house fell to pieces mid-display. In more recent years, sudden heatwaves have tested the resilience of planting designed for a mild May, while cold snaps have caught out tender species that their designers had assumed would be safely past risk.

The seasonal timing also shapes the cultural experience of attending Chelsea. The show falls at the cusp of the gardening year — after the urgency of spring planting but before the long days of midsummer — at a moment when the gardening enthusiasm of the British public is at its most buoyant. People arrive at Chelsea with their own gardens on their minds: the border that isn't quite right, the corner of the plot that needs a new idea, the question of whether to try that plant they have been seeing in magazines. The show answers these questions, raises new ones and sends its visitors home full of energy and ambition for their own plots. This practical impact on how real gardens are made is one of Chelsea's most significant and most underappreciated contributions to British horticultural culture.

Chelsea's Dark Horses and Near Misses

For every garden that wins Best in Show, there are several that come agonisingly close — gardens of extraordinary quality that, in a different year or with a different judging panel, might have carried off the top prize. Chelsea's near-misses are as much a part of its story as its winners.

Sarah Price's 2012 Telegraph Garden — described by multiple senior designers as worthy of Best in Show — was the garden that Cleve West beat to his second consecutive top prize. The garden's dreamlike naturalism, its copper-edged pools and its exquisite planting of waterside and woodland-edge natives continued to be discussed with reverence long after the show had closed. Price herself took the experience graciously, returning to Chelsea several more times to create gardens that confirmed her status as one of the most talented designers of her generation.

Luciano Giubbilei's 2011 Laurent-Perrier Garden — the one with Kengo Kuma's extraordinary bamboo pavilion and Peter Randall-Page's swirling boulders — was another that many observers felt was the equal of the Best in Show winner that year. Giubbilei, an Italian-Swiss designer whose work at Chelsea has been consistently characterised by a quality of meditative stillness and spatial precision, has never quite achieved the top prize but has accumulated a remarkable collection of gold medals.

Arne Maynard's Chelsea gardens have repeatedly drawn admiring attention from judges and visitors alike. His structural approach — espalier avenues, precisely trained trees, planting of great sophistication — has produced several gold-medal-winning gardens that demonstrated an exceptional level of craft and compositional intelligence. The question of why Maynard has not yet won Best in Show is one that the Chelsea community debates with genuine puzzlement.

The gardens that win Best in Show are, of course, the ones that the judges consider best on the day. The gardens that come close — the silver medal won when gold was expected, the gold that missed Best in Show by the narrowest of margins — are part of Chelsea's texture of aspiration and partial achievement. They are a reminder that even in a world of exceptional quality, distinctions must be made, and making them is always in some sense an act of reduction.

The Psychology of Chelsea: Why Designers Keep Coming Back

Competing at Chelsea is, by all accounts, an experience of extraordinary intensity. The lead time for a show garden — from initial concept to opening day — is typically twelve to eighteen months, during which the designer is simultaneously developing the idea, managing the production of plant material, negotiating with hard landscaping suppliers, coordinating with contractors, managing the sponsor relationship and dealing with the logistical demands of building a complex garden in a constrained urban site within a strict timetable.

The stress is formidable. Stories of sleepless nights, last-minute plant emergencies, contractors failing to deliver and unexpected structural problems are a staple of Chelsea designer accounts. The show is built under the constant scrutiny of an international media presence, constructed to a deadline from which there is no relief and judged before it is fully realised. And then it is dismantled.

The dismantling — the Chelsea sell-off, on the final afternoon of the show — is one of the most bittersweet experiences in the horticultural calendar. Visitors who have queued for the opportunity purchase the plants that have been growing in the show garden, taking home pieces of a designed landscape that will never exist in this form again. Designers watch as their creation is dissembled, their carefully placed specimens carried away by enthusiastic buyers. It is the moment when the ephemeral nature of Chelsea gardening is most starkly evident.

And yet designers come back. Often, repeatedly, for years or decades. Cleve West, Andy Sturgeon, Sarah Price, Tom Stuart-Smith, Dan Pearson, Sarah Eberle, Kazuyuki Ishihara: all have returned to Chelsea year after year, drawn by an attraction that is difficult to fully explain in rational terms but that most of them describe in similar ways. Chelsea, they say, is the place where their ideas are tested against the most rigorous possible scrutiny. It is the place where their work is seen by more people — and more of the right people — than anywhere else. And it is, for all its pressures and difficulties, a community: a gathering of like-minded people who share a conviction about the importance of gardens and a commitment to the highest possible standards of horticultural practice.

Kazuyuki Ishihara put it most simply, on receiving his thirteenth Chelsea gold medal in 2025: 'I feel like Chelsea is my life itself.' In those words is the essence of why the show continues to attract the extraordinary talent that makes it what it is.

What Chelsea Teaches Gardeners

Beyond the competition and the winners and the judges and the sponsors, Chelsea has always been first and foremost a place of learning. Every garden on Main Avenue, every display in the Great Pavilion, every artisan garden and urban garden and balcony garden, is teaching the visitor something about what plants can do and how spaces can be made.

The lessons are often absorbed unconsciously. A visitor who spends an afternoon walking Chelsea and returns home without consciously planning to make any changes to their garden may nevertheless find, over the following months, that their perception of their own plot has subtly shifted. A plant combination that caught their eye on Main Avenue resurfaces in their imagination when they are standing in their border wondering what to do with an awkward gap. A particular way of using stone, or water, or the space between plants, that struck them as right at Chelsea becomes a principle they apply without quite knowing where they absorbed it.

This transmission of ideas — from the designed garden to the domestic plot — is Chelsea's most diffuse and most significant legacy. The show reaches 157,000 people in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, but through television, digital media, magazines and the millions of conversations that Chelsea inspires among gardening enthusiasts, it reaches tens of millions more. Its influence on the physical character of the British garden — what is planted, how it is arranged, what materials are used and how — is incalculable.

Chelsea has also, over the decades, expanded what British gardeners consider within the range of the possible. Plants that were once considered difficult or specialist have, through their successful deployment in show gardens by designers who know how to use them, become accessible to gardeners of ordinary skill and ordinary resources. The idea that a garden should be ecologically coherent — that its plants should relate to one another and to their site in something resembling a natural community — would have seemed both ambitious and obscure to most visitors at the 1950s Chelsea. By the 2020s, it is the organizing principle of some of the most widely admired gardens in the country.

The idea that a garden can carry a message — can argue for a position, celebrate a cause, advocate for a group of people who have been overlooked — is another Chelsea lesson that has been absorbed more broadly than the show's commercial character might suggest. When Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg's Horatio's Garden wins Best in Show, it is not simply an aesthetic judgment; it is a statement about what gardens are for and who they should serve. When Ula Maria's forest bathing garden receives the same honour, it is a confirmation that the relationship between natural environments and human health is real, significant and worthy of serious design attention.

These are lessons that extend far beyond the showground. They enter the culture at large, shaping how people think about the green spaces in their lives — their gardens, their parks, their allotments, their school grounds, their hospital courtyards. In this broader sense, Chelsea is not simply a flower show. It is a conversation about human life and how it relates to the living world.

The Great Unresolved Arguments

Chelsea has always been a place where certain fundamental questions about gardening are contested, never finally resolved but kept alive and productive by the passion of those who care about them.

The deepest of these questions is perhaps the most ancient: what is a garden? Is a garden defined by its enclosure — the idea that a garden is a cultivated, bounded space set apart from the surrounding landscape? Or is it defined by the quality of human engagement with it — the attention and care that transform any piece of ground into a garden through the act of tending it? Can a piece of replicated wild landscape, however skilfully assembled, properly be called a garden if no individual plant has been placed by deliberate design? Or is the choice of where to allow nature to take its course itself a form of design?

These questions, which seem abstract, have very practical implications at Chelsea. They determine which gardens are eligible for consideration in which categories. They shape how judges evaluate designs that blur the boundary between the designed and the found. They inform the debate about naturalistic planting — about how far a garden can go in the direction of ecological complexity before it ceases to be a garden in any meaningful sense.

The closely related question of what a garden is for has also been a persistent Chelsea theme. The beautiful garden — the garden whose purpose is primarily aesthetic, that gives pleasure through its visual qualities — has always been Chelsea's central subject. But the therapeutic garden, the productive garden, the wildlife garden, the educational garden, the commemorative garden: all of these have appeared at Chelsea with increasing frequency and have challenged the primacy of the beautiful as the show's defining value.

Most thoughtful Chelsea observers would answer that these categories are not mutually exclusive — that a garden can be beautiful and therapeutic, productive and ecologically valuable, commemorative and superbly designed, all at once. The best Chelsea winners of recent years have consistently demonstrated exactly this. But the tension between different conceptions of what a garden is for remains productive, keeping the show honest and preventing any single aesthetic or philosophical position from hardening into orthodoxy.

The question of sustainability has moved from the margins to the centre of Chelsea's ethical agenda with remarkable speed. The ecological cost of creating a show garden — the energy, materials and horticultural intervention required — has become a serious concern, and the RHS and individual designers have taken significant steps to address it. Gardens built from reclaimed and reused materials, plant choices that reflect the conditions of the actual site rather than requiring intensive support, the rehoming of show garden plants to permanent situations after the show: these practices are now widely followed, and the conversation about how they can be further developed is ongoing.

The tension between exclusivity and accessibility is another Chelsea argument that never entirely resolves. The show is attended by a relatively affluent, relatively educated, relatively homogeneous audience — as much by virtue of ticket prices and the physical demands of a busy London event as by any deliberate policy. The RHS has worked to widen participation through school programmes, community garden initiatives and, increasingly, digital access to show content. But the Chelsea audience remains in many ways a narrow one, and the question of how the show's ideas and enthusiasms can genuinely reach the full breadth of the gardening public is one that the organisation returns to regularly.

Afterlives: Where Chelsea Gardens Go

One of the more melancholy pleasures of a Chelsea press preview is the knowledge that what you are seeing — this garden, in this light, at this moment — will be seen by relatively few people in its full and perfect form. The show runs for five days. After that, the dismantling begins. By the end of the first week in June, Main Avenue is clear.

But Chelsea gardens do not entirely disappear. Some are transplanted to permanent sites where they continue to be experienced by visitors. The Back to Nature Garden designed by Catherine, Princess of Wales, with Andrée Davies and Adam White in 2019 was subsequently recreated at RHS Garden Wisley, where it continues its mission of encouraging children to engage with outdoor environments. Horatio's Garden creates permanent garden spaces in NHS spinal injury centres; its Chelsea appearances are the public face of a programme of work that goes on throughout the year.

The plants from show gardens are carefully rehomed through the Chelsea sell-off, when in a few extraordinary hours of organised controlled chaos the carefully arranged planting of months is lifted, divided and carried away by enthusiastic buyers. The plants that have starred in Best in Show gardens have often had remarkable second lives: grown on by knowledgeable gardeners, sometimes appearing in other show gardens in subsequent years, sometimes becoming widely available through the nursery trade as a result of the publicity their Chelsea appearance generated.

The design ideas live on in a different way. The vocabulary of materials and approaches that a successful Chelsea garden introduces — the particular way of using Corten steel, or the combination of a specific group of plants, or the spatial approach that makes a small garden feel expansive — enters the bloodstream of garden design and spreads outward. Within a few years of Tom Stuart-Smith's 2006 Corten steel garden, the material was appearing in gardens across the country at every scale from major landscape projects to domestic back gardens.

The designers themselves carry the experience of Chelsea forward into their subsequent work. A designer who has stood in a Best in Show garden on the morning of the award — who has gone through the process of imagining a garden, testing the idea against reality, managing the complex logistics of bringing it into existence and then seeing it judged against the highest possible standard — is changed by that experience. Their subsequent work almost always bears the mark of Chelsea: a sharpened sense of what matters, a refined understanding of the relationship between concept and execution, an appreciation of the extraordinary power that a well-made garden can have.

The International Dimension

Chelsea is firmly rooted in British horticultural culture, but it has always welcomed and been enriched by international perspectives. From Minnie Hoyt's Californian desert scenes of 1929 to Ulf Nordfjell's Swedish aesthetic in 2007, from the Japanese garden tradition that has produced some of the show's most extraordinary work to the Provençal landscapes of James Basson and the Australian ecological gardens that have won gold in recent years, Chelsea's international dimension has been a consistent source of fresh ideas.

The Japanese presence at Chelsea deserves particular acknowledgement. Japanese garden philosophy — with its emphasis on contemplation, natural materials, meaningful space and the relationship between the cultivated and the wild — has been a recurring reference point in Chelsea design for many decades. But it is Kazuyuki Ishihara who has brought this tradition into the most direct and sustained engagement with the Chelsea competition, winning gold after gold over more than two decades and eventually claiming Best in Show in 2025 with a garden of such purity and conviction that it seemed to transcend the competitive context entirely.

Australia has produced remarkable Chelsea gardens. The Australian Garden, designed by Jim Fogarty and showing at Chelsea in 2011, was among the most striking of the international contributions. More recently, Andy Sturgeon's M&G Garden in 2019 drew on the ecological diversity of the Mediterranean Basin, the Southern Cape and similar world regions to create a planting of extraordinary originality. The willingness of Chelsea's judges to recognise excellence from non-British design traditions speaks well of the show's genuine internationalism.

New Zealand's contribution has been similarly notable. The 'Ora Garden of Well-being' presented by Tourism New Zealand in 2004 was the first authentic thermal New Zealand garden at Chelsea, winning a gold medal for its innovative presentation of a landscape tradition that had not previously been seen at the show. It opened the eyes of Chelsea audiences to the extraordinary horticultural richness of the New Zealand landscape and to the design possibilities that its specific ecology offers.

The international character of the Great Pavilion — with countries from across the Commonwealth and beyond bringing their horticultural traditions to the show — has always been one of Chelsea's most enriching qualities. The 1937 Empire Exhibition, staged to mark George VI's Coronation Year, was an early expression of this internationalism, featuring wattles from Australia, pines from Canada, gladioli from East Africa and a prickly pear from Palestine. The impulse to celebrate the global diversity of the plant world, and the different ways in which human cultures have related to it, is one of Chelsea's oldest and most persistent characteristics.

In Praise of the Silver Medal

It would be remiss, in a discussion of Chelsea's winners, to overlook the extraordinary value of the silver medal — and of the silver-gilt, that intermediate grade which acknowledges work of very high quality that does not quite reach the gold standard. Chelsea's medals are not consolation prizes. A silver-gilt from Chelsea is a genuine achievement, earned against competition that would be the highest standard in virtually any other context.

The distinction between gold and silver-gilt at Chelsea is sometimes exquisitely fine. A garden that judges consider almost but not quite at the gold standard — perhaps because the planting did not all achieve peak condition simultaneously during the judging window, or because one element of the design did not quite integrate with the rest, or because a hard landscaping detail fell short of the level the judges require — will receive a silver-gilt that is a recognition of near-miss quality.

For designers, a silver or silver-gilt at Chelsea is both a spur and a challenge. Many of the show's most celebrated names have experienced silver-gilt years that preceded gold-medal triumphs: the award acting as a diagnosis of where the work fell short and a prompt to return more prepared. The iterative quality of Chelsea careers — the gradual improvement across successive shows, the learning from each experience, the deepening understanding of what the judges require and what the space demands — is one of the most interesting aspects of the show's character.

The non-competitive exhibits — notably the Chelsea Pensioner's Garden at the 2025 show, and the dog-friendly space designed by Monty Don — add yet another dimension to the show's complexity. The decision to include gardens that are designed to be experienced rather than judged is a recognition that not everything of value at Chelsea fits neatly into a competitive framework. Some things are better celebrated than evaluated.

The Words That Chelsea Lives By

Every year, as Best in Show is announced and the winner makes their way to receive the award, the same qualities are invoked by the judges in their explanation: horticultural excellence, design innovation, emotional resonance, sustainability and purpose. These words have become Chelsea's values — the principles by which a century of extraordinary gardens has been created and judged.

Horticultural excellence first: because a garden without plants, without the living material that is its fundamental substance, is not a garden at all but a piece of landscape architecture. The plants must be right — right for the site, right for the season, right for each other. They must be grown well, presented beautifully and chosen with the depth of botanical knowledge that only genuine study and long experience can provide.

Design innovation because the world changes, gardening culture changes and the garden must change with it. The design that was radical at Chelsea in 1997 may be conventional by 2007 and nostalgic by 2017. The show garden that wins Best in Show is almost always one that sees a little further ahead than its contemporaries — that introduces a material, a plant combination, a spatial concept or a design idea that will be widely adopted in the years that follow.

Emotional resonance because gardens are not merely objects but experiences, and the experience of a great garden is not simply visual. It involves the smell of crushed herbs and wet earth, the sound of water moving over stone, the feeling of being held within a space that has been made with care and intelligence. The Best in Show garden almost always has this quality of containment — the sense that within its boundaries a particular experience is being offered that could not be had anywhere else.

Sustainability because the twenty-first century has made it impossible to ignore the ecological costs of garden-making, and because the garden, properly understood, is not in opposition to nature but in relationship with it. A show garden that squanders resources, that imports materials carelessly, that uses plants divorced from any ecological context: such a garden cannot represent the best of what gardening can be.

And purpose — the quality that Chelsea's winners of the 2020s have most powerfully expressed — because gardens are not just for the people who design them or the sponsors who fund them or the judges who evaluate them. They are for people: all people, including those who are ill or injured or grieving or frightened, those who have never had access to a garden of their own, those who would not think of themselves as gardeners but who nonetheless need the qualities that a great garden provides.

These are Chelsea's values. They are also, in a broader sense, the values of British gardening at its best: generous, knowledgeable, open to the world and deeply, stubbornly committed to the importance of growing things well.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is held annually in May in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, London. The show is open to RHS members on the first two days and to the general public thereafter. All tickets must be purchased in advance.

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