Chelsea Flower Show - Significant Gardens and Exhibits

Significant Gardens and Exhibits

  • 1929 Mrs Sherman Hoyt's exhibit of American cacti, complete with painted backdrops depicting the Mojave desert, which was acquired for Kew and had its own glasshouse there for over half a century, before being absorbed into the Princess of Wales Conservatory
  • 1930s J. Macdonald's grass gardens – the lone voice declaring the merits of ornamental grasses for his generation
  • 1936 Hilliers' 'Dingley Dell' exhibit
  • 1937 Coronation Year: the Empire Exhibition, with displays of ornamental and economic plants from around the Empire
  • 1953 Another Coronation Year: William Wood of Taplow staged a 'Cutty Sark' garden
  • 1959 The Times 'Garden of Tomorrow', complete with radio-controlled lawn mower
  • 1960 The great orchid display to accompany the Third World Orchid Conference
  • 1964 Popular Gardening's 'Garden of Today'
  • 1967 The first garden for the disabled at Chelsea
  • 1968 Wisley's exhibit of hostas, which gave a great boost to their popularity
  • 1980 Display of penjing from China
  • 1982 Brenda Hyatt's display of auriculas, which launched these plants back into popularity
  • 1988 John Chambers's honeybee garden
  • 1993 Julie Toll's seaside garden controversially won the last Wilkinson Sword award for best garden, described by David Stevens as "a sand dune garden that was well planted and beautiful, but visitors said it wasn't a garden."
  • 1994 Isabel and Julian Bannerman's Daily Telegraph Old Abbey garden, with a virtuoso display of mature tree transplanting
  • 1996 Dan Pearson's London roof garden for the 1990s
  • 1997 Christopher Bradley-Hole's Latin Garden, the first garden at Chelsea to exhibit the new fashion for sparse planting
  • 2000 The Garden History Society's Le Nôtre Garden, and Piet Oudolf's winning 'Evolution' garden
  • 2009 James May's Paradise in Plasticine, a garden made entirely of Plasticine. Its concept and creation was documented for James May's Toy Stories.
  • 2010 Row after row of exotic orchids from Taiwan, presented by the Taiwan Orchid Growers Association (TOGA). This was the first time that Taiwan was invited to the Chelsea Flower Show.
  • 2011 Diarmuid Gavin's Irish Sky Garden. This was the first garden to be suspended in the air.

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