Chelsea Flower Show 2024: What happens to all of the gardens after the show?

Designing an award-winning garden for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show is a gargantuan task in itself - but designers will also be thinking forward about their living art’s life beyond the show.

The annual Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) event kicks off in London next week, where it will run from 21 to 25 May. While there will be extensive TV coverage on BBC One and Two - including special programming where viewers can vote for this year’s ‘people’s choice award’ show garden - there’s nothing quite like seeing the extravagant blooms and intricate garden designs in person.

This year’s themes for the show is ‘the greenest Chelsea ever’, with the RHS committed to hosting a sustainable event and promoting more eco-friendly gardening. All show and sanctuary gardens featured at the event will be undergoing a ‘green audit’ this year to reduce the event’s carbon footprint, and there will be efforts to use water more wisely, and reduce, reuse and recycle components rather than letting them go to waste.

The gardens themselves will also move on to new lives after the show. But what exactly will happen to them, and how do they find their new homes? Here’s everything you need to know:

Living on after the Chelsea Flower Show

Either in part or in their full glory, the gardens will find new homes with charities, schools, or in community spaces. As of last year, the RHS decided that all of the gardens on display will need to have a plan for after the show ends, House Beautiful reports.

Sometimes the show gardens are broken up, and the trees and plants used in them are donated via its official partner Wayward, who have reportedly seen some 70,000 plants to date livening up underserved parts of London. The plant exchange programme is currently looking for volunteers to help move plants to community projects and schools after this year’s show. You can find out more here.

In a somewhat more painstaking process, other gardens are moved and re-planted in their entirety - often donated to charities or botanic gardens. The good news is, you can still visit many of these fantastic gardens across the UK in years to come.

One example is the a silver gilt-winning garden from 2023 Chelsea Flower Show, designed by Martyn Wilson. After the show the garden was transported by staff and volunteers in a major operation to the RSPCA Stapeley Grange Wildlife Centre in Nantwich, Cheshire, where it was rebuilt with all its flowers, trees and - in an area set aside as a community wildlife project.

Designer Wilson drew inspiration for the award-winning garden from walks in native woodlands with his dog, and its design includes a watcher’s hide - where people can observe the different species already making the garden their home. The hide includes a green roof and bee hotels - to encourage pollinators to take residence. There is also a stylish water feature made of recycled plastic, bird nesting boxes, and ‘dead hedges’, which provide a habitat for birds and insects.

The relocation saw five lorry-loads of displays, plants, trees and fittings transported from London to Cheshire. After the plants were uplifted they were cared for by Stapeley Grange’s maintenance and education teams, as well as volunteers from a local gardening group. Around 4,000 plants were arranged under a marquee - with a watering system set up to protect them during extremely hot June weather - where they were gradually replanted under Wilson’s direction.

The RSPCA has opened the garden to visitors free of charge on every Saturday throughout May (from 10am to 1pm), so the public can also enjoy its wildlife-themed features and wonderful collection of plants and flowers.