RHS Hampton Court: 11 ‘Real Garden’ Trends You Need to Know

The trends for your garden from RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival – the ones that work in real life gardens.
00:00 The RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival: https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events
00:34 Raised beds – now design led
01:01 Patchwork hard landscaping
01:48 The small garden becomes a large courtyard
02:32 Recycling and upcycling
03:21 Formal wildlife gardens with clover in the lawn
04:42 Add colour with fences, furniture and other items
05:21 Divide up space with a dead hedge
05:54 Wood, logs and planks as vertical interest and ornaments
06:20 Foliage is more important than flowers
06:50 Ornamental veg, edimentals and mixing food with flowers
07:26 Your guttering is part of your garden!
08:16 More ideas for your garden from BBC Gardeners World Live: https://youtu.be/qY4J2zRmRO4

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I’ve just come back from the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, and I’ve picked out some top trends that I think will really work in your garden. Often show-gardens are designed to either stimulate debate or make a point; both of which of course are very worthwhile, but sometimes you can look at a show-garden and think "well, I don’t know how I’m going to do that in my garden", but these are the points that actually I think do translate into real gardens. It’s Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube Channel and blog. So, to start with raised beds. Raised beds used to be a really practical thing. They were in allotments, but they’re now troughs, they’re decorative. And the reason for this is that the larger the container is, the easier it is to grow well in it. So to have a huge trough raised bed is much easier than lots of little pots. And of course we have many more gardeners who are renting now, and you can take a raised bed trough with you. So raised beds have in some ways become like borders. Hard landscaping – using a mixture of pebbles, pavers, bricks and gravel – is one of the most attractive trends of today. And it also saves money, because you can have a small amount of a more expensive material and a larger amount of a cheaper material. And it also helps with preventing flash flooding. If you have a garden that is completely covered with stone or concrete or brick, then when it rains all the water goes into the town drains. And of course if there are lots of gardens in a town or city that are all completely covered over, then a huge amount of rain water goes into the drains at once. And that’s why you get flash flooding. But if you mix pebbles, gravel, pavers, brick and planting, then much more is absorbed into the ground. And this leads on to how the small garden has turned into a large courtyard. It really is very difficult to keep a lawn going in a very small garden, particularly if it’s shady. It’s easy to turn it into a mud bath. So what’s tended to happen is that people only pave the areas like the paths and where you want to sit, and then they make the planting areas much bigger than they perhaps were in the past. And once again that’s really great, it looks beautiful, lots of flowers or planting, it absorbs the rain water, gives more for nature for pollinators, it looks gorgeous for you. And there are a couple of gardens that really did this well. In fact many of the gardens at Hampton Court Flower Show did it beautifully. Recycling. Well there were recycled sheds and pots and pavers and troughs at Hampton Court – as there were the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Arit Anderson’s garden – the RHS Peat-Free Garden – was probably one of the most beautiful gardens in the show – and it used a huge amount of recycling. The shed was made from recycled windows and glass doors. There was recycled paving. There was vintage furniture and recycled troughs and planters. When I talked about recycling at the Chelsea Flower Show, a few people did comment that vintage items or upcycled items can either be difficult to find, or they can be expensive – and those are fair comments. The people I know who do best with recycling and upcycling are people who just love to pop into a charity shop, or a junkyard, or an architectural reclamation yard, or to go through eBay, or look up Freecycle or Freegle. Because if you do all those things regularly, you will find things and you will find them at affordable prices. But of course if you only start looking for your pavers or your windows or your troughs when you actually want them, it can be difficult to find them at a price you can afford – and that you like. So if you enjoy hunting for bargains, this is a great thing for you. If you don’t, perhaps recycling or upcycling isn’t for you. A clover lawn – short, neat, formal, but wildlife friendly. There’s been a great division between the wildlife friendly and the neat tidy gardeners in recent years, so it was wonderful to see the RHS Wisley team do a show-garden which actually was very geometric, very neat, and it had a smart clover lawn. Now you won’t get the stripes beloved of the 20th Century gardens, but nevertheless it’s neat and it’s short, and the clover flowers effectively beneath the mower’s blades. Having more clover in lawns can also make the lawn a bit more drought resistant and heat tolerant. The other thing they did in this RHS Wisley formal garden was that they had a geometric design, and then at the corners they had you know quite neat boxes, which contained bug hotels, and on top of that were container ponds. So it just shows you that you can be geometric, neat, tidy, formal – and wildlife friendly. The next one is adding colour with fences or furniture. In a small garden you can make a big impact with colour by using coloured furniture, or painting the fence or wall. You can either use bright colour, as here in the Denmans Garden which was inspired by the legendary garden designer John Brookes, or you can use this bright orange for example in Juliet Sargeant’s Disney Lion King Garden, or you can actually use quite a soft colour. Because Arit Anderson’s garden – and also the Mediterranean Garden by Katerina Kantalis – both use very soft subtle colours on the fencing or walls. And actually that had a huge impact as well. Mark out the space with a dead hedge. There have been dead hedges I’ve seen in real gardens and show-gardens for a few years now, but they have been very big. The RSPB says that the dead hedge is an upright structure of woody cuttings woven between vertical stakes. It’s a good way of disposing of garden clippings, and it’s also very wildlife friendly. But the ones I’ve seen so far seem really too large for small or middle-sized gardens – and rather dominating – but this one in Juliet Sargeant’s Lion King Garden actually just shows how you can divide up the space with a dead hedge without taking up too much space. Logs and planks are the new ornaments. It’s very important in smaller middle-sized gardens to have some vertical interest, because the eye goes up, and then it goes down again, and it goes around the garden, and it just makes you feel that there’s more there, and that there’s more space. But of course you don’t want something that really dominates in a small space, which is why logs and planks and even upright stones have been used just to create that vertical element without taking up too much space. Foliage is more important than flowers. Well, this is hardly a new trend. Garden designers have been trying to make us do this for years. Just look at the foliage on these begonias from Dibley’s. They’re not hardy enough to live in the garden all year around, but if you have them as house plants, you can bring them out into the courtyard garden during the summer. And even more brilliant, the heucheras here from Plantagogo. I mean these are like begonias, but they can grow in the garden all year round. And even hostas have brilliant foliage – although you would have to keep them in pots to try and keep them away from slugs. Edimentals. Well, I’ve been talking before about how many gardens today don’t have room for a separate veg patch, and so veg are being grown in amongst the flowers. And also we’re looking much more widely at the sort of flowers we can eat. One of the things you can do is grow extraordinarily beautiful vegetables, and the queen of this is Lucy Hutchings of She Grows Veg. Her collection of heirloom vegetables – which are open pollinated – are beautiful and extraordinary, but also taste good, and even the seed packets are absolutely gorgeous. Your guttering is now part of your garden. I did spot an Alitex greenhouse with succulents growing in the guttering that have been planted by the RHS Wisley team. And I’m really not sure how this works, but they know their stuff, so I assume that’s something you can do. More seriously though, the guttering on Arit Anderson’s RHS Peat-Free Garden shed had a chain going down, and the water goes from the gutter down the chain into a tank, which you use for watering the garden. It also feeds a container pond, and that has an overflow pipe that goes into a little mini rain garden, which is an area that can get very wet when it rains a lot – but it doesn’t matter if it dries out in hotter drier times. The use of water in gardens has been a major theme in all the show gardens this year. I spotted more ideas for your garden at BBC Gardeners World Live this year, so don’t miss that video which is coming up now. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!