Is it worth putting yourself through the wringer of going to The Chelsea Flower Show?

Or would you see more if you stayed home and watched it on the telly?

Rachel de Thame on the Farewell Flowers Directory exhibit at Chelsea 2025

You’ll definitely see more if you stay home and watch it on the telly. Watching the coverage of Chelsea Flower Show over the week is a bit like bingeing a looooong series on Netflix. At first the premise is clear, the characters well drawn, the problem to solve - who’s the best? - immediate. But as time goes by the show begins to wear, the characters merge into one another, the show gardens dry, and the story tellers, the script writers, seem to be scrabbling around a bit for content. By the end of the week it’s a relief to see the end of it. Though next year we’ll all sit down cheerfully to watch it again, in hope of something truly extraordinary, like the Benton End Garden by Sarah Price in 2023.

So why do we go? Why not just watch it on the telly where you’ll be taken onto the gardens to see them from the inside, get up close and personal with designers and horticultural movers and shakers, and not have to worry about getting to London, or the eye-watering hay-fever caused by the London Plane trees in May.

There’s something astonishing about herds of gardening enthusiasts descending on London. Last year I was waiting to meet my colleagues to judge Chelsea in Bloom, sitting in Sloane Square drinking coffee on Tuesday morning of Chelsea week. And from the tube, and off the busses came masses and masses and masses of keen gardeners. Dressed as for a day’s fancy hiking, in comfortable trainers, loose trousers, maybe a flowery shirt, but a sensible hat to protect from what might be fierce sun later. Carrying small rucksacks with water, sun cream, antihistamine, sandwiches if they’re clever (food and drink are not cheap inside Chelsea Flower Show,) they form a snaking crowd heading down Sloane Street and on to the Royal Hospital Road.

The atmosphere is one of carnival. This is a big day out. The ticket alone will have cost over £100, then there’s travel, possibly an overnight stay, not to mention the need to eat and drink while in London. People don’t just come from around the UK. This year I have a hot date with Dee Hall Goodwin, founder of Black Flower Farmers who’s flying all the way from Norfolk Virginia to see whether this show is worth the hype.

And as you’re funnelled down the Royal Hospital Road to the London Gate to the park where the show is held the chat is cheerful and enthusiastic. You talk to the people ahead and behind you, find out where they’ve come from, what they’re looking forward to seeing. After all the show is big enough that you can spend a whole day there and not see it all. People will be suggesting strategies for seeing the show best: do you whip round first to get your bearings and find out what’s where and then go back more slowly once you’ve identified what you think needs a second look? Are you interested in plant varieties and finding nurseries to sell you the perfect rose/fern/daffodil/variety of cosmos? Then you might head straight for the Great Pavilion. Are you champing at the bit to see the big show gardens on main avenue? You might have been following the design and build process on social media and feel almost personally invested in how the project has turned out.

Whatever the draw, you’ll be shuffling in the queue now, waiting for your ticket and bag to be checked. And the funnel takes you to the first thing you see when you enter the Chelsea Flower Show - the SHOPPING opportunities. These are not to be ignored: many great suppliers have show discounts, and it’s a place where you might be able to for the first time weigh that pair of Niwaki snips you’ve always felt you might need in your actual hand - good idea, they’re all hand made and no two pairs the same. You need to really choose the actual pair of snips to fit you from Niwaki.

But don’t be distracted: shopping is for the way out. For now, if you’re me, you duck left straight down to the exhibits made in the cool shade of Ranelagh Gardens. Here I get my eye in and usually find my favourite exhibit - something with ideas I feel I can translate into my own garden space. Of course it might be my favourite too because I’m fresher at this time of day: my feet don’t hurt yet, I’m not annoyed with the crowds (I’m five foot two, crowds are like walls to me,) These gardens are more relatable. I feel welcome here. This mooch down the Ranelagh Gardens might take an hour ending up with the house plants by the food court - I’m a keen killer of house plants so I don’t loiter there for long. At the bottom I stop for a strategic pee before pushing up the hill and girding myself to approach the main avenue gardens from the south.

This is where the crowds are. This is where to be able to see any detail you have to elbow your way to the front… or… edge round and look from the side. There will be a thinner crowd there. However you do it, looking at the main avenue gardens is a time consuming and focused effort. You could wait to do it later, but the crowds will only get thicker until late in the afternoon when people start to go home.

Having worked your way round the main avenue gardens you may be in need of a sit down and a re-group. This is where money can be spent and frankly, you’re already a couple of hundred down on the day, and a good cup of coffee at the far west end of the north side of the show and a seat in the shade while you sit down for half an hour is worth the extra capital outlay - I think.

Only then do I approach the Great Pavilion, from the west side. And compared to the scrum on main avenue this is a peaceful wander through a cathedral of plants. Each stand, from the most diminutive nursery selling an array of woodland perennials to the specialist producers of daffodils or delphiniums is a delight in perfection. Serried ranks of plants in perfect condition, taller, wider, bluer, better than any you or I will ever grow at home, stand sentinel to the medals displayed proudly at the front of each stand. To achieve those medals is no mean feat: the exhibitor will have been able to drop no more than one or two points from the perfect 12 (I think it’s 12… I have to fill in the form for the FftF exhibit spec in the next days - I’ll know exactly by the time I’ve done it!) The Great Pavilion is where you find the plants people - the specialists who love to talk about their niche in the already niche world of gardening. You will get the best, most expert advice in the world from these people. And as you take note of their website address so you can order from the safety of your own kitchen table later and have fresh plants delivered at a time perfectly suitable for both you and nursery owner the lovely thing is you don’t have to carry anything now, today, around the hot show and the hot streets and on the hot tube and hot train home. Other RHS shows are shopping bonanzas - and the plant nurseries rightly love them for this - but you must drive in order to be able to haul away your loot, and at Hampton Court, for example, the miles you must haul that loot over bridge and river through fields to the car park always almost ruins the day for me. This show is for looking. You choose when you get home. If the shopping experience becomes a kind of feeding frenzy you risk getting home with plants galore and nowhere to put them except in that big fat hole in your bank account. I like the Chelsea experience: no shopping for plants makes for a much more considered day. The plants you can’t resist from the show will stay with you. Their photographs revisited on your camera role. Those are the ones you know you’ll order.

Yesterday I was at Kelways in Langport where I was reminded of the perfect combo made by an Actinidia (kiwi fruit) and a passion fruit. I could so easily have bought these incredible quality large and delicious looking plants there and then. But I don’t have space for them. I’m about to go and exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show. This is NOT the time for such an investment. But I can see that Actinidia very clearly with its gorgeous part pink part green leaves, and I remember the wall of it at Hidcote from visits over twenty years ago, and I know that now I have that Actinidia in my sights it will come here to Common Farm soon. But MUCH better I leave it in the hands of such expert nursery people until I’m ready for it, than that I buy it and regret that I cannot care for it with the tenderness it deserves until June.

So. You’ve seen the best part of Chelsea now. You’re likely starving. You can do one of two things at this stage: sit down in the dry shade of Ranelagh Gardens and eat the sandwiches you brought with you, or buy yourself a snack lunch from one of the vendors. Or, and this is my recommendation, I would buy a small snack, something to keep you going for another hour or so. Go round the show again, looking at the things that really tickled your imagination or your plant list. Make sure you have the information you need re each exhibit that fired the creative juices. Ask for plant lists, get plant names, make sure you have the names of the nurseries whose exhibits you liked. You can mooch around the south west side where there are stalls selling amazing garden sculptures, or go and try on diamonds at Boodles: the skill is to have given yourself enough to eat to do this mooching part.

Then I say leave. Always leave a party before you stop having a good time. You’ve had the best of the show. The crowds are now so thick you can’t see through even if you’re six feet tall. On the way out treat yourself to something from one of the stalls in the shopping lane: the Niwaki snips, or just a Chelsea mug (I have both snips and mugs from years gone by.) Walk back up Sloane Street and now, this is where I’d treat myself to proper lunch. Sit down at a table on Sloane Square, or walk up Pavilion Road, or take a bus to somewhere cheaper. But since you’ve already spent a couple of hundred quid on your trip to Chelsea maybe you may as well really go for it and a glass of wine and proper lunch at a table with a cloth and linen napkin I think finishes off the day beautifully. So you have lunch mid afternoon. You’ve had an amazing time. Your head is full of ideas and possibilities. And most of all you’ve been with your tribe of celebrating gardeners. Some people love a football match and will go no matter what the price. Others will pay great chunks of savings to hear a singer sing or go to a festival. Chelsea Flower Show is the equivalent for gardeners.

And in the same way that you’ll certainly see more football and singer on the telly, so you would Chelsea. But the fun part for us is that all the coverage is on I-player. So you can go to Chelsea, have an amazing day, then go home and watch it all again from the inside of the gardens with the designers and the BBC teams to show you around.

If you’re going this year I’ll see you there. I’m on stand GPE063 in the Great Pavilion with the mini flower farm created for the show by the Flower Farming trade body Flowers from the Farm.