Chelsea Flower Show 2025: The first garden designed by a dog

(Image credit: Ollie Dixon/RHS)

published 6 May 2025

Together, Monty Don and his golden retriever, Ned, have designed a garden for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show — a doggy first for the event.

Plantsman Jamie Butterworth, who is creating the RHS and Radio 2 Dog Garden with Don, laid it all out at his nursery, Form Plants in Surrey, then invited Ned to run through all the pots and plants to create pathways to make it ‘as authentic as possible’.

‘Ned followed his nose and forged the routes that we will now copy at the show,’ explains Butterworth. ‘We had imagined that Ned would create sweeps and curves through the planting or, at least, that is what we had designed. However, every time he ran off, he returned to Monty via the same route and, as such, we have changed the designs… So Ned actually designed not only part of the garden, but possibly the most detailed and complex aspect.’

Clare Matterson, RHS director-general, adds: ‘As a nation of gardeners and nation of dog lovers, we hope this garden makes people smile both when they hear about it and when they see it.’

The Country Life 'Outdoor Drawing Room' is at stand PW210 at the Chelsea Flower Show from May 19 to 24 May. For more information, visit the Country Life Chelsea Flower Show hub or the RHS website

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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