Category Archives: Chelsea flower show

Talk to your plants? Now the first AI-powered garden will allow them to talk back

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Collaboration between leading garden designer and Microsoft to go on display at Chelsea flower show 2025

Hardcore gardeners sometimes, when no one else is listening, talk quietly to their prize blooms. But at next year’s Chelsea flower show, visitors will be encouraged to have a chat with its first ever AI-powered garden.

The garden designer Tom Massey has partnered with Microsoft to create the Avanade “intelligent” garden. Sensors in the soil are partnered with an AI trained on Royal Horticultural Society plant data and gardening advice, meaning visitors can ask the garden: “How are you?”

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Monty Don’s first Chelsea garden will be dog-friendly

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Gardeners’ World presenter is bucking the trend to make the event more inclusive

Some gardeners at the Chelsea Flower Show may balk at the idea of a dog scrabbling around near their prize roses.

But Monty Don is designing his first Chelsea garden for next year’s event – and making it dog-friendly.

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‘Edible meadow’ for improved gut health to feature at Chelsea flower show

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Flowers used in the ‘microbiome garden’ can enhance gut health by being eaten or just walked past

An “edible meadow” designed to improve gut health is to be displayed at the Chelsea flower show this year.

The two gardeners behind the “microbiome garden” say it will be filled with flowers that can enhance gut health by being eaten or just walked past.

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Chelsea flower show garden built with asylum seekers brings ‘message of hope’

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Choose Love garden uses materials found in refugee camps and plants that grow on migration routes

A centrepiece garden at this year’s Chelsea flower show has been built with the help of a team of asylum seekers with a design that recreates Europe’s migration routes and uses materials found in refugee camps.

The Choose Love garden, named after a charity working with displaced people, uses the sustainable “superadobe” building technique found in camp architecture.

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Chelsea flower show embraces trend for grow-your-own veg

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Supermarket shortages mean community food projects will have a prominent place in this year’s show

Supermarkets have rationed fresh fruit and vegetables in recent months as a combination of Brexit, bad weather and labour shortages has hit supply and driven prices up.

Those shortages have led to a surge in people growing their own, according to the Royal Horticultural Society, and that trend will be reflected at the Chelsea flower show from 22 May.

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Gay wedding and schoolchildren to feature at ‘inclusive’ Chelsea flower show

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Annual RHS show uses theme of accessibility in effort to broaden appeal of horticulture

Chelsea flower show has long been a staple of the society calendar, with celebrities and royals making an appearance among the peonies and roses.

However, this year, the Royal Horticultural Society is trying to make the show – and horticulture – more inclusive, by putting on special events for children, and encouraging the creation of gardens with an accessibility theme.

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April’s cold weather shows its time to fill our gardens with hardier plants, say experts

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Top gardeners advise use of tougher varieties that can cope with extremes of heat and cold as conditions disappoint growers

Gardeners are being urged to grow plants that can cope with extreme heat and cold after the Royal Horticultural Society was bombarded with letters from members asking why species they had cultivated successfully for years were now dying.

“It seems to be because of the temperature fluctuations,” said Nikki Barker, a senior horticultural adviser at the RHS. “We’ve gone from severe drought with an initially very mild autumn that turned cold. It’s the combination of weather patterns rather than one single event. And plants find it hard to deal with that fluctuation.”

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