Rising stars on the garden design scene only a few years ago, Joe and Laura Carey of Carey Garden Design Studio are returning to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for a third time this May. And now among the gardening elite with two from two gold medals, can they score the Chelsea hat-trick?
The Careys are the designers behind this year’s “Addleshaw Goddard: Flourish in the City” small show garden. They’ve been tasked with linking gardens with urban living and celebrating the heart — and very home — of the flower show. The garden will represent London and the importance of those delightful patches of green which stitch our capital city together. London is a green metropolis — more than half is made up of green and blue space — and it became the world’s first National Park City in 2019, making it fitting inspiration for Chelsea.
Carey Garden Design are a husband and wife duo who met at university in Nottingham studying art and design, and decided after careers in teaching and marketing to turn their gardening hobby into a business in 2020. “We immediately realised the garden was the accumulation of all of our skills coming together, my engineering brain and Laura’s love of plants,” Joe Carey explains. “Lockdown created that vacuum of thinking time. Within six months, we’d quit our jobs, sold our house, moved with a nine-month-old baby to Norfolk and worked on our plan.”
London newsletter
The essential guide to London — curated, trusted, unmissable.
Sign up with one click
He is the risk-taker of the two, applying for Chelsea (the first time) on a whim with less than a year’s professional experience under their belts. “The industry,” he says, “is very welcoming to people who’ve not come through the traditional routes.” They failed in their first attempt but succeeded in 2023 — winning a coveted gold medal and best in show.
There’s less than two months to go until the start of Chelsea Flower Show, and the official build starts on April 30, only 20 days before the garden must be fit for a king (King Charles will be shown around). “We met him both years, and last year he stopped and asked Laura if she was OK, because it was a very hot day. It will be lovely to be able to show our garden with strong links to Buckingham Palace to the King this year.”
Regardless, the Careys have a relaxed attitude towards such big tasks — matching Joe’s nonchalant personality. Where most designers turn up to the site with an army of helpers in steel-cap shoes and matching branded high-vis, he turned up to his first Chelsea build with just a few family and friends. “The first year we weren’t particularly stressed, we had nothing to lose. But last year definitely felt like the difficult second album.”
A sketch of their Addleshaw Goddard: Flourish in the City show gardenCarey Garden Design Studio/Alister Thorpe
Choosing London as your muse is so broad: what will the design be focusing on? “The garden is called Flourish in the City, not Flourish despite the City. There’s a distinct difference,” Joe explains. His passion for championing the city’s vibrancy combines with his fascination for the architect Thomas Heatherwick, who is renowned for integrating lush public green spaces with infrastructure. “I’ve always been a fan of his work,” Joe says. “His team is currently working on a campaign for humanised movement, which is to encourage better city design.”
Joe agrees that urban design should not purely focus on function and finance — glass and plastic façades — but craftsmanship and complexity. “And we thought, well, in a garden you can do just that. You can balance repeating the same colours and the same textures, but bringing the complexity in the variety of plants and the variety of ways you might showcase a material.”
The show garden will glamourise all of the quintessential materials on London buildings — Portland and Bath stone, concrete, copper and brass — in “jewel-like moments”. Joe excitedly tells me at the RHS spring conference in London, where he arrives after his annual “pre-show tour of Britain”, collecting bits and pieces he’d ordered in the lead-up to the show: “Everything links back to London.”
The couple will also include an innovative material called oystercrete — a nod to London’s historic oyster trade, and a more sustainable alternative to concrete. A design studio called Matter Forms based in Hackney collects discarded oyster shells from London restaurants, to crush and develop into a biomaterial. Joe geeks out: “It’s almost as strong as concrete, but has up to 50 per cent reduced carbon. The best bit is it looks much nicer, as little bits of oyster shell stick out.” The Flourish in the City garden boundary wall will be built out of used oysters — a first for Chelsea.
Like most Chelsea gardens, will there be a complex water feature? “It always seems to end up so complicated,” he says, and this year is no different. “The water has to disappear under the garden and pop back up. And then gently pour over these weirs, out of a boulder with ten precarious slots, ending up in a subterranean pool.” The intricate conception is inspired by London’s underground rivers — it’s the one thing that keep the Careys up at night.
Laura and Joe Carey: “We’re trying to introduce a bit more looseness in the plants and a bit more creativity in the layout”alister thorpe
Arguably the most important thing at Chelsea is the planting. “This is where Laura shines — her planting style has a unique brushstroke.” The garden will feature carefully curated plants that grow well in urban environments, including Saxifraga x urbium ‘London Pride’ due to its historic connection with the city of London, recolonising and growing in the bomb sites after the blitz. “We are also including plants that have chosen to make their home in the cracks in walls and pavements like plantago and verbascum,” Carey says. “And trees in the garden that thrive in cities and are masters at minimising pollution like Pinus sylvestris ‘Pines’ and Ginkgo biloba ‘Gingkos’.” After the show, the garden will be relocated to Baston House School in Bromley.
According to the RHS the big buzzword at this year’s Chelsea is colour. What do the Careys — whose style is more naturalistic — make of that? “We have some pops of acid greens and yellows, as well as pinks among the big blanket of sage green. We’re trying to introduce a bit more looseness in the plants and a bit more creativity in the layout and again, championing these interesting urban materials.”
Designers usually have a few plant casualties owing to unpredictable weather — yes, even Monty Don. “We’ve never succeeded, but Laura is trying again this year to include bearded iris,” Joe says. As the pressure mounts in the final few weeks, anticipation builds for show gardens — will all of those intricate design decisions and measurements come off? In his tongue-in-cheek way, he replies casually: “Now all we have to do is assemble it.”
Comments are closed.