Innovative coastal garden turns heads at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Among the 31 show gardens conceived for this week’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Landscape Designer Nigel Dunnett’s ‘Hospitalfield Arts Garden’ – designed in partnership with Scottish arts charity Hospitalfield Arts – has been making waves today with its progressive approach to sustainable landscape and planting design. Taking inspiration from the coastal location of the Hospitalfield arts centre in Arbroath, Scotland, Dunnett’s highly sculptural garden on Chelsea’s ‘Main Avenue’ features striking sand dunes, an active ‘bothy’ art studio (created by contemporary cabin designer Bothy Stores) and a clay-lined ‘dune pool’ irrigated by rainwater harvested from these structures.

For seasoned Chelsea designer Dunnett, who has long championed planting design as an impactful art form, creating this architectural ‘dune-scape’ for the show has been an exciting challenge. 'Chelsea is a place for new ideas, for experimentation, and to take risks', he commented, 'and that is certainly the spirit in which we have developed our garden'. Bordered by durable Scot’s pine trees, an exposed wooden framework of reinforcing ‘fins’ provides the backbone for Dunnett’s dramatic dunes, holding the sand in place and mimicking the natural ‘wind-blown’ appearance of Arbroath’s sand dune topography. Its rust-red, iron filing-infused paint chimes with the adjacent corrugated bothy – which throughout show week will be inhabited by activist-artist Bob and Roberta Smith – and supports a diverse range of evocative coastal plants.

But the dunes also highlight progressive gardening attitudes towards inorganic soil mediums, with repurposed aggregates such as gravels, sands and even crushed concrete increasingly employed as sustainable alternatives to ‘improved’ and unnecessarily pampered topsoils. Subverting the outdated adage that all garden plants prefer growing in ‘perfect’, nutrient-rich topsoil, Dunnett’s plants have been established in sand, a contemporary propagation technique pioneered by Swedish nurseryman Peter Korn. Sand-grown plants form deep roots and develop less flimsy top growth, demonstrating greater resilience and stability in the face of increasing climate extremes.

'We hope this garden will spark conversations about our changing gardening habits', says Dunnett, whose former ambitious public landscape projects include plantings for the 2012 Queen Elizabeth Olympic and 2022’s Tower of London ‘Superbloom’. 'The great benefit of these recycled aggregates is they provide drainage, allowing warmer climate plants to survive our wet winters – it’s a garden of the future', Dunnett explains. 'The dune structure itself also introduces a ranging topography within a small space – high and low areas, wet and dry, light and shade; transforming a low diversity situation into a high diversity one.'

Show-goers attending Chelsea’s opening day today will have noticed in Dunnett’s curated arrangement of resilient and notably silvery-leafed plantings an aesthetic departure from ‘traditional’ British planting schemes and indeed those of Chelsea Flower Shows past, with its hardwearing shrubs like germander and rock rose, and its feral dune grasses, chamomile and sea kale. ‘It’s a very different look’, suggests Dunnett, 'but it gives us a glimpse into a radical future where, as has happened in much of the UK over this spring, we will face extended rain-free periods and long spells of above-average temperatures'.

Elsewhere in the show, meanwhile, many of the gardens have similarly addressed contemporary environmental challenges, from sustainable water capture and the use of ‘biochar’ to preserving endangered ecosystems and micro-farming the crops of the future. This underscores the RHS’s endeavours to make Chelsea a platform for innovative ideas within horticulture.

Following Chelsea, the Hospitalfield Arts Garden — sponsored by ‘gardens for good causes’ charity Project Giving Back — is due to be relocated to a primary school in Arbroath close to Hospitalfield, where it will be adapted to provide a space for children and teachers to enjoy and foster creativity.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show runs from 20 May 2025 – Sat, 24 May. Get tickets