What to see at Chelsea Flower Show 2025, according to our garden editor

Nigel Dunnett’s Hospitalfield’s Arts Garden also looks to the future for its plant choices, focusing on resilient and drought-tolerant coastal planting. Within an abstract design centred around large, dune-like sculptures made from timber ‘fins’, the planting rises and falls in an undulating landscape of sand, with silver-leafed and glaucus foliage plants such as Crambe maritima and Artemisia ‘Valerie Finnis’.

The garden focuses on resilient and drought-tolerant coastal planting

Eva Nemeth

The planting rises and falls in an undulating landscape of sand.

Eva Nemeth

They are interspersed with tough grasses (Leymus arenarius ‘Blue Dune’) and bright pink sea thrift (Armeria maritima), vivid yellow Bulbine frutescens and purple-blue salvias. Established in sand and gravel, the plants are given space to stretch out and breathe, showcasing the shape and form of each specimen.

Nigel Dunnett garden Chelsea Flower Show 2025Eva Nemeth

A corrugated iron bothy stands at the back of the garden with a hidden rainwater harvesting system that runs off the roof to accumulate in a small dune pool, utisising every drop of rain that falls from the building.

Jo Thompson’s Glasshouse Garden is a real crowd-pleaser, with a rich and colourful planting palette and roses galore – a garden you can imagine around your own home. Designed for the Glasshouse enterprise, which offers horticultural training in women’s prisons, the garden is an immersive and sensory space designed with health and wellbeing in mind.

Jo Thompson garden, Chelsea 2025Eva Nemeth

Jo Thompson garden, Chelsea 2025Eva Nemeth

An elliptical pavilion stands at one end, with doors that pivot open all round to give different views out. At the back is a rocky pool, the source of a bubbling stream that channels into a curving rill, culminating in a tranquil pool. Under a leafy canopy of trees including resilient river birch (Betula nigra) and drought-tolerant Japanese zelkova (Zelkova serrata), a rich, textured planting unfolds.