Gardening Advice & Tips for Irish Gardeners

Whether its planting combinations, ideas for garden features for just for a bit of inspiration, the Chelsea Flower Show never fails to impress. This Year, in the depths of a recession and with the bad weather doing its best to dampen everyone’s spirits, the show has once again come up trumps. To get the most out of the show you really need to be there, and be there on the quieter days. The first two days of the event are reserved for RHS members so if you want to see the gardens without having to wade through a sea of people you should consider joining. It’s easy and can, like most things these days, be done online.

With some gardens being a little more cautious than other years a more practical edge to the show became evident and with that visitor can leave the show with a better sense of how to transfer high end garden ideas back to their own garden, rather than being mentally bamboozled from all the radical exhibits. This year’s winner of the best show garden was Trailfinders Australian Garden which used familiar garden plants which truly embraces the Australian theme including Eucalyptus (The Gum Tree), Buxus (Box), Dictsonia Antarctica (Tree Fern) and several grasses.

The Verti Garden was ever evident this year and used with great effect in the Royal Bank of Canada’s Blue Water Roof Garden. Verti Gardens are the use of wall mounted planting modules which are filled with soil and can be planted with a range of low growing plants from grasses to Heuchera to ferns. Ranging of plants allows users to create a vertical tapestry of plant across a garden wall, garage or house.

The Laurent Perrier Garden showed just how to create a classy touch of the Parisian with their use of formal Yew hedging against a backdrop of fastigate oaks. The Telegraph garden deisgned by shows the use of block planting and how it can really pay off to be bold in your choice of plants and features.

One thing for sure that we see again and again in these gardens is the use of evergreen hedging to create a structural and backbone element to their spaces. They all also use a limited number of plants and a limited colour pallet to maximise impact without creating a confused planting scheme.

The ideas and inspiration is endless at Chelsea this year and it is certainly helping to wet the appetite for the upcoming Bloom Flower Show in Phoenix Park next weekend, the 30th of May.