Filippo Dester
Garden Designer - The Hamptons Mediterranean Garden
Filippo lifts the curtain to share behind the scenes insight on creating a garden for RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
Building a Sanctuary Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower show takes only 16 days. Designers and landscapers are allowed a matter of weeks from arrival on site until the day judges visit the garden, before the show opens to press and hundreds of thousands members of the public.
Planning
Behind those couple of weeks is over a year of planning, from the initial design and application to participate, to the selection of plants, materials, and features that make the gardens at Chelsea so unique. The idea for the garden was concieved almost a year ago, with sketches drawn and plants selected.
Plants for the gardens are contract-grown for the show by specialist nurseries with years of experience. Whilst most herbaceous perennials are usually grown from the previous fall, through winter and into Spring to look at their best at the end of May, the mature trees and specimen shrubs that make all gardens look so well established are sourced from all over Europe and imported in the UK a few months before the show to acclimatise.
Two or even three-times the number of plants required for a garden are grown in the nursery to make sure that the ones reaching the show are no less than perfect.
More than two thousand plants will be used in the Hamptons Mediterranean Garden, including trees, shrubs, succulents and many flowering perennials and scented herbs.
Building the Garden
After the design has been approved, all details decided, materials selected and features sourced, it’s finally time to start building the garden. With just over two weeks of time for both hard and soft landscaping to be completed, multiple teams of people are working on different areas of the garden at all times, and a well organised schedule is essential to make sure everything is built as quickly and efficiently as possible, and to the best standard of the industry that the show calls for. 
Once the walls and paving and water features are finally in place, the teams of tilers and carpenters are replaced by ones of expert horticulturists that slowly and methodically position all plants, mulch, and detail the garden to achieve spectacular displays of texture, colour and scent.
And after Show Week has been and gone and hundreds of thousands of people had the opportunity of admiring the result of all this hard work, it’s already time to take one last picture of the garden before it disappears, broken down in only three days.
Although the result may be short-lived, building a garden at Chelsea Flower Show is a fantastic endeavour and team effort, and all the hard work pays off in satisfaction for creating a unique space that could rarely be achieved elsewhere.
