Chelsea Flower Show

Sam is an independent garden designer and lecturer who this year made his debut all on his own at the Sandringham Flower Show, designing a beautiful border.

However, Sam is most known online for his work at the Chelsea Flower Show, where he and a designated team representing the RHS deal with all of the re-landscaping, planting and beautification of the areas around the Chelsea Hospital, which plays host to the world famous Chelsea Flower Show every single May.

He, alongside a designated core team representing the RHS, actually have the job of re-landscaping, maintaining and planting all of the areas around the Chelsea Hospital, which obviously plays home to the Chelsea pensioners.

These areas are often overlooked, with all of the attention shown on the huge installations along Main Avenue, and of course in the Grand Pavilion.

However, these areas are incredibly important, with sustainability at their core.

They not only have to be beautiful during the actual Chelsea Flower Show itself, where it sees simply hundreds of thousands of visitors over its week, But they also have to remain beautiful, practical and of course look good all the way through the year to be enjoyed by the hospital's residents.

This huge task aside, I also wanted to talk to Sam about his design process, how he approaches a brand new landscape design customer and of course his general attitude towards gardening.

So I hope you enjoy the conversation that follows.

So we'd have conversations via email and that was how I got to know her.

And then I'd obviously see her at media events such as Chelsea Flower Show and so on.

the Garden Media Guild Awards and garden press events and we always gave each other a big hug and I just was pulled in by her beautiful smile and she just had a wonderful twinkle in her eye always.

And as you do when you learn about the other aspects of people's lives, when you hear about other things that they've done, not just gardening, she was such a rich character when it came to her hobbies and her interests.

Later in the programme, another Matthew.

Matthew Pottage will be finding out what happens to one of the celebrated show gardens once the doors have closed and the lights have gone out on another Chelsea flower show.

That's coming soon, but right now, let us take our first question.

Hello, I'm Fionnuala Barnes from Ashurst.

it a

massively fast growing yeah

almost unbelievable well there we go that's what we need to do thank you panel and thank you judy for the question and we'll have more questions from our audience here in the new forest very shortly The Chelsea Flower Show, as we know, is a staple in the gardening calendar.

And for many who make the pilgrimage, the celebrated show gardens are the jewels in Chelsea's crown.

So after Design Miami, we then followed that with Milan Design Week in April, where we had a presence there.

We then actually, for the first time, partnered with the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which was really interesting.

I'd never really worked on designing a garden or anything like that before, so that was interesting.

kind of curious how do you take the kind of brand dna it's a vehicle it's automotive world how do you then translate to the landscape garden world

Thank you that the king goes to.

What tickets cost for that? So I just feel like by the time I finished the Chelsea Flower Show article, I was like, there must be space for opera in Britain.

There has to be.

So definitely traditionally, and I probably would say especially to Americans, we look like, we like to give this impression of ourselves as a sort of cultural, intellectual powerhouse.