Show green Eco tips from Chelsea

GARDENS featuring more weeds and less formality have taken centre-stage at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, placing more emphasis on letting nature take control.

Native plants and trees, nettles, dandelions and a predominantly green palette of planting feature in many of the 36 show gardens, along with salvaged and upcycled materials.

Here are some of the highlights:

RECLAIMED GARDEN

Crushed concrete, piles of rubble, bare sand, re-used bricks and other recycled material dominate many of the show gardens’ pathways and form decorative features in several gardens.

There’s a message to get gardeners thinking about how they might reuse materials which formerly headed for the skip.

Award-winning designer Tom Massey, above, who has this year designed The Royal Entomological Society Garden, predicts: “Reuse of waste materials is going to be a big thing.”

He uses crushed construction waste in his show garden, including crushed bricks and concrete to create a textured, aesthetic backdrop for the planting along with deadwood. “These waste materials are really good habitat for insects,” he points out.

NURTURE LANDSCAPES GARDEN

If you’re looking to take home some plants with you, be inspired by the beautiful Benton irises in rich shades of pastels and deep yellows which you’ll see in designer Sarah Price’s Nurture Landscapes show garden, inspired by the artist and plantsman Cedric Morris.

MEMORIA AND GREENACRES TRANSCENDENCE GARDEN

Designers Gavin McWilliam and Andrew Wilson’s garden aims to deliver an uplifting spiritual space, reflecting the emotional experience at the end of life (it’s going to a bereavement site after the show).

Controversially, they’ve used concrete, but with the idea that this concrete is going to be around for hundreds of years. It’s not a single use concrete.

It has a simple palette of planting, is cool and calm and you immediately feel rested. The minimal use of materials and colour palette was really special and a moment of calm in the entire show. It was a relief to get to it.

HORATIO’S GARDEN

Putting wheelchair access at the forefront of their design, Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg (Harris Bugg Studio) have created the eighth garden for the eponymous charity, which builds gardens to improve the lives of people with spinal cord injury.

The wheelchair-accessible space features a tactile stone cairn and a table water feature to encourage wildlife, while a garden pod provides a cocooning place for physical and emotional shelter. After the show it will be relocated to Sheffield’s Princess Royal Spinal Cord Injuries Centre.