Hold on to your trowels! Here's what to see at The Chelsea Flower Show 2026

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 (the event's 113th edition) is now underway, opening its doors today to a week-long throng of eager garden visitors, design devotees and botanical enthusiasts. Some 145,000 guests, in fact, are expected to fill the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea to explore the 18 dynamic show gardens, 21 container, balcony and houseplant gardens on show; including three main feature gardens and the garlanded Great Pavilion of the world’s most prestigious gardening event.

Enter the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026

The hope, always, is that one comes away with a level of rounded inspiration: to have scribbled down the name of a charismatic plant or three, and – if you’re like me – to have seen an architectural aesthetic or approach to landscape design in a new, flattering light. Increasingly, there is even hope of encountering the glint of a greener, more sustainable future.

This was certainly the case last year. Pervading the exhibits of Chelsea 2025 was a growing sense of the show’s potential as a platform for progressive thinking: of designers looking with evident sincerity at how gardens – in both their soft and hard features – can push beyond beauty to tackle the climatic conundrums of the day. Floodwater management, landscape conservation and the repurposing of rubble aggregates were all themes explored within the show’s gardens. Emphasising sustainability felt like heralding a year of tentative readjustment.

Chelsea Flower Show 2026 trends

Reuse

There are, of course, echoes of that readjustment in the themes of the Chelsea Flower Show 2026. To start with, recycled materials are prominently displayed. As in last year’s ‘Hospitalfield Arts Garden’, designed by landscape architect Nigel Dunnett – who sadly passed away last month, leaving an astonishing legacy and a great hole in the horticultural world – we see aggregates and structural elements repurposed as the foundation of some of 2026’s gardens. Chelsea veteran Tom Stuart Smith reimagines a garden for Tate Britain; its paving and circular block seating reuses elements from the Tate’s existing site. Meanwhile, Patrick Clarke’s rust-chic garden for The Children’s Society recycles steel rafters.

AI

We note the return of AI, too. Introduced at last year’s show by garden designer Tom Massey as an innovative way of monitoring tree health, 2026 now sees the tool employed in the design of three of the show’s gardens, raising concerns over a precarious future for garden designers. It coincides with celebrated garden designer Matt Keightley launching a garden design app this year, Spacelift, which uses AI to assist bewildered garden owners in making headway with their outdoor spaces.

Climate change mitigation

Once again, climate change mitigation surfaces in various exhibits, not least in the solar-panelled classroom shelter at the heart of the Eden Project’s very beautiful ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ garden, and its cockleshell-infused terrace footing. There’s also the welcomed emphasis on accessibility, with gardens being conceived as navigable for all, from the smoothness and materials of guiding pathways to the acuteness of angles and gradients. This is evidenced in the graded steps and rest points of Angus Thompson’s immersive woodland-edge garden, and again in Tom Stuart Smith’s Tate Britain garden, with its illuminated, sensory-stimulating pathway.

Narratives

Amid everything, there is a distinct theme of ‘narrative’ this year: of taking prime users and would-be garden visitors on an intentional, educational or exploratory journey through the gardens. In conceiving her show garden for the charity Parkinson’s UK, garden designer-cum-television presenter Arit Anderson has been explicit in this theme, addressing the complexity of the neurological condition via a defined serpentine route through contrasting areas of planting. Guided by a tactile water-rilled hand rail (neatly branded a ‘hand-rill’) made of smooth engineered Accoya wood, those experiencing the effects of Parkinson’s are given the space and security to navigate the garden at leisure. Deeply concave, the bold rails convey the trickling of water as it follows a path adorned with colourful, fragrant and medicinal plantings.

Water

Anderson’s garden leads us neatly, too, to the definitive theme of 2026: water, water everywhere. It flows near-continuously through the show ground. If last year's designers were puzzling over the importance of water capture and conservation (Dunnett’s rainwater-harvesting ‘dune pool’, Baz Grainger’s permeable pathways, Ryan McMahon’s marine ‘seagrass’ garden), this year they are positively revelling in the stuff, celebrating its vital, calming, life-giving quality. And as in Anderson’s hand-rill, here is where the show’s hardscape design reveals its ingenuity.

Water courses through the elegant, snaking rill of the Tate Britain garden; it reflects from the giant stone basin of Imogen Perreau’s foxglove-punctuated scheme in the Great Pavilion. Pooled water brightens the planting of the Eden Project’s ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ garden and the Japanese courtyard by seasoned Chelsea gold medal winner Kazuyuki Ishihara. In the smaller Balcony and Container gardens, water pours into iron cauldrons, bubbles up into stone planters and streams down the vertical copper of May Starey’s Balcony garden for Scottish distiller, Fettercairn Whisky.

Copper

To continue with the theme of copper, this is undoubtedly the prominent, saturating colour of this year’s show more widely. Earthy tones, to speak more generally: it’s in the giant sandstone mounds of the Project Giving Back garden by James Basson (masterfully brought to life by Mark Whyman Landscapes); it’s in Angus Thompson’s distinctly red-brown soil and the terracotta walls of Frances Tophill’s feature ‘Curious Garden’ for the RHS and The King’s Foundation.

Most striking, perhaps, are the structural clay-rendered walls of Darren Hawks’s ‘Silent No More’ garden, inspired by the work of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida. Against this copper foil, dark elders, silvery subshrubs, wandering species roses and magnetising ‘Benton’ irises pop across the show ground, in an echo of Sarah Price’s still-lauded 2023 Cedric Morris-inspired show garden.

Chelsea Flower Show highlights

Having bumbled around the show ground, drawn like a nectar-intoxicated bee from one beauty to another, here are some of our not-to-be-missed contributions that define the Chelsea Flower Show 2026.

The Show Gardens

Two are the standouts this year: Patrick Clarke’s The Children’s Society Garden, with its remarkable cohesion of colour stemming from the prominent recycled steel rafters; and the Eden Project’s 'Bring Me Sunshine’ garden, inspired by the landscapes of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, where the educational charity will soon open an exciting new, £100 million regeneration and climate education project.

Designed by Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis, this latter exhibit manages to balance perfectly the innovation of a climate-combatting shelter structure - low-carbon, shell-based concrete (’clam-crete’, comprising the by-product shells of the area’s fishing industry), the soothing application of water and truly beautiful plantings (among them striking blue anchusa, samphire and sea thrift).

The Balcony Garden

Among the compact, intricately designed Balcony presentations, Sarah Mayfield and Monika Greenhough’s ‘Hedgerow in the Sky’ garden marries wonderful woodwork with wild, distinctly un-urban plantings. Charred log slices, taken from naturally felled trees (including arboreal victims of ash-dieback disease), provide a water and heat-resistant cladding material, while hedgerow shrubs of hawthorn and hazel have been selected to provide nature within the city.

All About Plants

In this Project Giving Back-sponsored category (sadly the philanthropic funder’s final year of funding gardens for charities), which puts plants at the centre, Charlie Chase’s stunning and diverse planting palette shines through. Designed for youth mental health charity YoungMinds, Chase has brought in unusual and specialist plants from independent plant nurseries, supporting a vital industry, and these intermingle with exquisite naturalism below the characterful bows of weeping cedar trees and southern beeches. And yet the hard structure of Chase’s garden bears an integral message also: all of it has been brought in as waste product: the stepping stone pads are reclaimed offcuts from quarries, the rammed earth walls constructed from waste removed from other garden projects.

In the Great Pavilion

To take a moment’s breather from the show’s bold and ambitious exhibition gardens, wander into the calmer waters of the pavilion to the appealingly modest and gem-glinting stand by Sussex-based nursery Pelham Plants. Here you’ll find low indigos and verbascums, coral geums and, my personal favourite of the entire show, the soft pink yet prominent Nepeta rocemosa ‘Amelia’ — a plant as architectural as it is relaxed.

..and afterwards

Following on the show's recent tradition, Chelsea’s 2026 gardens have been designed to be relocated to new, permanent homes after the show. Even though this is an ambitious prerequisite, it is a vital dimension of the RHS’s sustainability credentials. As such, the mental shift now is towards seeing this grand exhibition as a shop window for future gardens, rather than purely an exhibition for exhibition’s sake. It will be exciting to see how Tom Stuart Smith’s garden for Tate Britain settles into the gallery’s prestigious setting. Similarly, it will be thrilling to admire Anderson’s sculptural hand-rills reappear at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Meanwhile, the other heartening shift this year is seeing designers shouting out the brilliant, essential, quick-paced and creatively delivered work of their construction contractors.

At a time when traditional handicrafts and their associated materials are being championed so fervently, it would be remiss for figurehead designers not to publicly recognise the remarkable skill and dexterity of their workforce. In the lead-up to this year’s show, on social media, there have been pleasing instances of Chelsea designers acknowledging and commending the achievements of their team within the context of their celebratory, end-of-build posts. This, we can hope, lays the foundation for more vital developments in the show’s future.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 runs 19-23 May 2026 at London Gate, Royal Hospital Road, Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, SW3 4SR