There are plants galore to drool over at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, from classic roses to exotic rarities that are becoming more viable to grow in the changing climate. To get the most out of the show, the trick is to slow down and look at the detail in each exhibit, photographing individual plants and combinations that inspire you, and absorbing contrasting shapes and colours.
Star plants in the show gardens
One of the gardens that kept me lingering longest is Jo Thompson’s gold medal-winning Glasshouse Garden, which is planted in her signature romantic style with generous swathes of roses and perennials anchored by domed beech spheres. Her colours are rich and vibrant with deep raspberry and rusty reds set against pale mauves and pinks with airier flowers to break up the intensity of colour.
A combination that particularly caught my eye was a central border with rich magenta-red Rosa ‘Wild Rover’, pink ‘Beth’s Poppy’ (Papaver dubium subsp. lecoqii ‘Albiflora’) and lacy pale pink Pimpinella major ‘Rosea’, with burgundy flowered Astrantia major ‘Roma’ dotted through.
Three other rosy pink plants stole my heart in this garden: a delicate Delphinium called D. x ruysii ‘Pink Sensation’, the pretty summer flowering shrub Deutzia x hybrida ‘Strawberry Fields’ and the oriental poppy, Papaver orientale ‘Patty’s Plum'. Last but not least, a Siberian iris called ‘Paprikash’ that I am going to be buying immediately. It has dusky mauve upper petals and rusty red falls with gold centres - absolutely beautiful.
Next door in Tom Hoblyn’s Hospice UK Garden were some fascinating plants I hadn’t come across before, many of them grown from seed by Tom himself.
First, a lupin with cobalt blue flowers caught my eye, Lupinus pilosus. Looser in flower than some of the tightly-flowered lupins, it is elegant and relaxed, its natural habitat the scrubland of Greece and other Mediterranean countries.
It was growing with other jewel-like plants such as crimson Adonis annua and softened by gently moving foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum). Elsewhere, two other plants stood out: the tiny rusty-orange foxglove, Digtalis obscura, native to parts of Spain and Morocco, and a fabulous brick red South American evening primrose, Oenothera versicolor ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (available from Chiltern Seeds). Both these plants are borderline tender but may be OK in the south of the UK.
Tom Massey singled out the uniquely coloured Sambucus ‘Milk Chocolate’ as his plant of the show in his garden for Adenade. A recent introduction, it has handsome burnished bronze foliage that emerges light brown and deepens to mahogany as it ages, flowering later than other varieties with large umbels of white flowers.
He also pointed out the Siberian iris ‘Pansy Purple’ which has flowers in the most intense shade of deep purple. This cultivar isn’t widely grown in the UK but deserves to be better known. Also standing out in the mix was a vibrant and beautiful anemone - A. x lesseri ‘Spring Beauty Pink’.
There are some unusual plants to look out for in Nigel Dunnett’s garden, all of them exceptionally drought tolerant and growing in nothing but sand and gravel. You’ll spot the unusual curving coral-red flower spikes of Hesperaloe parviflora straight away on the outer ‘dune’ of his garden, emerging from their spiky understoreys. This is a surprisingly hardy plant as long as it has well drained conditions. The other plant to look out for is the Canary island geranium, G. palmatum, which is often confused with G. maderense. The latter has a dense cushion of deep pink flowers and darker stems, whereas G. palmatum is more rangy, with bright green, deeply divided leaves and magenta pink flowers on long stalks. It is hardier too, and will survive frosts as long as it is in light soil.
In the ADHD Garden designed by Katy Terry, a distinctive curving hornbeam creates a focal point for the garden, alongside a self-supporting standard Hydrangea petiolaris, more often seen growing up a north-facing wall.
Underneath is a carpet of the shade-loving Phlox divaricata subsp. laphamii 'Chattahoochee', with flowers in a beautiful lavender blue. In this garden, as well as the Freedom to Flourish Garden by Carey Garden Design, you’ll spot the unusual poppy ‘Amazing Grey’ with its distinctive dusky mauve-grey flowers.
Plants in the Grand Pavilion
Having previously been short on nursery exhibits, the Pavilion feels excitingly full of plants again this year. A whole corner is devoted to National Plant Collections, with immaculate displays of cosmos, foxgloves, peonies, cornus, rhododendron and Benton irises. These desirable irises were bred by Cedric Morris in the 1940s and ‘50s and come in an array of subtle colours. ‘Benton Olive’, for example, is the colour clotted cream with falls beautifully streaked with mauve. ‘Benton Susan’ has gingery upper petals and white falls edged with deeper brown. They are all equally covetable.
Kevock Plants has a display that you could spend hours looking into. I picked out two exquisite peonies. One was the single flowered Paeonia anomala subsp. veitchii with dusky pink blooms, and the other was a chance seeding from that species with the most extraordinary copper-orange flowers. Unfortunately these peonies are extremely difficult to propagate from, so this form isn’t currently available to buy. In a particularly intense shade of orange is a diminutive form of Primula cockburniana with tiny flowers, suitable for a spot in partial shade in fertile, well drained soil. The distinctive shuttlecock flowers of Dodecatheon meadia are woven throughout the exhibit in deep and pale pink, best for a damp soil in dappled shade.
In the Burncoose Nursery exhibit, I was drawn to several forms of Kalmia latifolia, also known as mountain laurel or the calico bush. An evergreen shrub typically reaching 2-3m, it produces clusters of pretty flowers that look like little parasols when in bud. The cultivar that caught my eye was ‘Minuet’, which is a dwarf form growing no more than a metre tall, whose white-edged flowers look as if they have been block printed with a band of brick red. Another cultivar ‘Snowdrift’ has pure white flowers with faint dots of red.
Finally I must tell you about an exhibit that stopped me in my tracks right in the centre of the Great Pavilion: a display of trained fruit trees from tree specialist Frank P. Matthews. Most of them in full blossom, these exquisitely trained trees are shaped into espaliers, fans and step-overs, with beautifully looped branches turning them into living works of art.
