Feature gardens RHS Hampton Court
The four feature gardens planned for this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival (6th to 11th July 2021, sponsored by Viking) will amply demonstrate the Show’s themes of sustainability and wellbeing.
The RHS Cut Flower Garden, designed by Carien van Boxtel will be a true celebration of colour demonstrating different growing combinations for big and small spaces. Colours ranging from whites, apricots, burgundy and blacks to soft orange and shell pink, will demonstrate how plants from the garden can be used as cut flowers and grown in one season.
There will also be a RHS Cut Flower Garden Demo Tent, situated alongside the feature garden, demonstrating what can be done with the flowers you grow. Guest speakers will explore a range of summer plant and colour combinations and topics will range from floristry, painting and dyes to other artistic techniques.
The RHS Iconic Horticultural Hero Garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, returns for a third year and celebrates influential names in horticulture. Tom has designed a garden made up of climate-resilient planting, featuring perennial meadow interspersed with Mediterranean shrubs. The garden has been designed to suit prolonged hot and dry conditions.
Included in the drought tolerant palette will be Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’, Salvia sclarea var. turkestancia, and Eryngium yuccifolium, grown in the UK by Sunnyside Rural Trust, a charity and social enterprise offering training and work experience for vulnerable people with learning difficulties.
After the show the plants are being relocated to RHS Wisley where they will be used in the replanting of the bicentenary glasshouse garden which Tom designed in 2007.
The RHS No Dig Allotment Demonstration Garden, designed in association with Charles Dowding and Stephanie Hafferty, combines Charles’ 40 years of experience pioneering and developing no-dig techniques with Stephanie’s decades of organic allotment growing.
The garden will demonstrate how to grow abundant food year-round without digging or disturbing the soil. The garden will show how no-dig works in greenhouses, polytunnels and pots, to grow healthy and delicious vegetables, fruit and flowers.
This will be an interactive garden with a community feel and the designers will be on hand to answer questions. It is supported by Dalefoot Composts, Gardening Naturally, First Tunnels and Burgon & Ball.
The Enchanting Rose Tea Garden, designed by Nikki Tibbles and Wild at Heart, will provide a refuge of serenity, where guests can enjoy a cup of tea and slice of cake while taking in the beautiful surroundings. Guests will be surrounded by an abundance of fragrant colourful roses in a garden with a colour palette of reds, oranges, pinks and yellows. Roses of all types will be grouped and ripple throughout like an exotic marble. There will be a gazebo draped with rambling and climbing roses and at the centre of the garden a large weathered urn will be bedded out with decorative ferns.
For further information on the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival please visit: ww.rhs.org.uk
Picture credits: Banner ©RHS/Tim Sandall; RHS Cut Flower garden ©Carien van Boxtel; RHS Iconic Horticultural Garden ©Tom Stuart-Smith
