'The few days on the show ground are exhilarating, but it’s the garden’s legacy that truly excites us': What happens to the gardens after Chelsea Flower Show

I designed my first show garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show nearly 30 years ago. It was an experience that I really enjoyed and that went down well with the public — not so well with the judges, but what do they know? After a week standing in the garden, chatting to people, schmoozing the sponsor and nodding at the Queen, I was pretty much on my knees with exhaustion.

The last thing to engineer was the breakdown of the garden. The constraints of the site at the Royal Hospital require the ground to be restored to grass as quickly as possible, so garden teams have to remove all their debris and put all the soil back in place. This process is absolutely no fun at all for anybody: a garden you have laboured over for more than a year has reached the end of its life and, especially in those days, it was a brutal process.

The first thing was to dig up and sell off as many plants as possible, which generated a nice little cash bonus for everybody (I still have the very snappy toaster I bought with the proceeds) and led to the classic ‘last-day-of-Chelsea’ news photographs of people struggling onto buses clutching 8ft-tall Delphiniums.

After that a man came and drove a metal spike through the base of the pond in order to drain the water followed by a digger that laid into the structure of the garden with ruthless enthusiasm. I have to admit that, at this moment, my wife took me by the elbow and persuaded me to go home and not stay to witness the rest of the destruction. The awful truth was that much of the garden ended up in skip somewhere.

Lots of things have changed. I have spent 10 years as a trustee of the RHS and have been judging gardens at RHS Chelsea for the past 18. We have shaken up the judging system and, in recent years, looked sternly at the sustainability of the show gardens as a whole. It seemed immoral that these very expensive and beautiful creations were only in existence for five days and then discarded. Although things had improved since the days when (as happened a long time ago) palm trees were flown in from the Middle East and thrown on the compost at the end of the show, it needed even more.

The first step was to make sure that as much as possible of the waste from the show was recycled — we are now on 98%. A borehole was dug to reduce reliance on mains water, power was run across the site at build-up stage so contractors did not have to run noisy, fuel guzzling generators and changes made to catering and shopping. You will no longer find a plastic bag or fork at RHS Chelsea.

A further policy was introduced a few years ago that all gardens exhibited at all RHS Shows (Malvern, Chelsea, Hampton Court and Tatton Park — this year, for the first time, moved to Wentworth Woodhouse) could not be accepted unless they had a final destination. Chelsea is now only a stop along the way, before they end up somewhere where the trees, the structures and the idea have a further life.

We are quite broad minded about this — some gardens are recreated verbatim, others are redesigned using the same ingredients, and some are broken up with the components scattered among a number of different places. The essential fact is that anybody who sponsors a garden at an RHS Show owns that garden and can donate it to whosoever they wish: they could have it at their office or they could rebuild it to help a local good cause.

This was helped by the arrival in 2022 of Project Giving Back — this is one of the great Chelsea good news stories. It came from an inspired idea, conjured up by the anonymous founders, to support a wide range of charities whose work suffered due to the pandemic and, more recently, because of the cost-of-living crisis. Their vision was that they would give grants to a varied and geographically widespread selection of charities so that they could have the unique opportunity of promoting their work at RHS Chelsea. Over the past five years, they have sponsored 60 gardens, both large and small, and all of them have been re-created after the show to benefit an extraordinary range of charities.

Joe and Laura Carey, an up and coming design duo based in Norfolk, exhibited a small garden at Chelsea in aid of the Talitha Arts. The garden was transferred to the St Margaret’s House in Bethnal Green, London, where it now lives a vibrant second life: by day, it’s a café garden, and by night and weekend, it transforms into a venue for performances, local events, community groups, and therapy sessions.

‘The relocation turned out to be the unexpected icing on the cake,’ remembers Joe. ‘After the excitement and recognition of Chelsea, we had braced ourselves for an uphill struggle, so we were genuinely surprised (and relieved!) by how quickly and smoothly everything went.’ This year they are designing two show gardens: one at Chelsea and another at Hampton Court. ‘For us, it’s always the long term that fuels the passion behind any show garden. The few days on the show ground are exhilarating, but it’s the garden’s legacy that truly excites us.’

Hospitals are a popular option for relocated gardens as they are accessible by lots of people and we all know what a difference gardens can make to patients. Take the delicious garden that won Best in Show in 2023: designed by the talented duo, Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg for Horatio's Garden — a charity that puts well designed and maintained gardens in spinal injury centres across the British Isles. Currently they have seven working gardens across the United Kingdom and the Chelsea garden was always destined to be rebuilt as the eighth garden in Sheffield. The trees, paving and buildings that we all saw at Chelsea have been reinstalled on the site of an old car park at the Northern General Hospital. It has taken time and a lot of wrangling, but this June, the garden will open up for patients, visitors and staff.

Another 2023 Gold medal winning garden, immaculately designed by Nicola Semple and Susan Begg for the Teapot Trust, ended up in the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Glasgow and the Miller Brothers 2022 Foraging Garden went to Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool. Tom Stuart-Smith's garden for Maggie's Centres from 2024 will settle in Cambridge, the Terrence Higgins Trust Garden designed by Matthew Childs is going to Croydon University Hospital and Miria Harris's garden for the Stroke association has reappeared at the Chapel Allerton hospital in Leeds

Schools also benefit from the gardens. The Bee Garden, which was the RHS feature garden in 2023, was re-created as a whole at St George's Primary School in South London and Harry Holding's School Food Matters Garden was reconfigured and divided between two schools in Ealing and Liverpool. Lottie Delamain's Textile Garden now lives at Headington School in Oxford while Charlie Hawkes Wilderness Foundation Garden settled in Henry Maynard School in Walthamstow.

Not all gardens go to charities — often a particular feature or building is destined to grace a client's garden. I myself am the proud owner of some of the rocks from Cleve West's beautiful, Gold medal winning garden for M&G in 2016, which currently adorn my pond at home while various clients of mine are now in possession of trees, boulders and paving that I recycled from various show gardens over the years. The yard belonging to Crocus (who have built over 30 Gold Medal winning gardens and 12 Best in Show since 2000) is a fertile hunting ground for interesting leftovers!

Chelsea is a big show, full of flamboyance and lots of people drinking champagne and enjoying the very best in horticulture. What should not be forgotten is that this week raises a lot of money that is spent by the RHS over the following 51 weeks on all manner of great things: community gardens, mental wellbeing, gardening in schools, horticultural careers, libraries, gardens and world leading scientific research. The fact that all the gardens are now going on to light up the lives of others is yet another reason to cheer the RHS.