The M&G Garden, RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2021
We’re really excited to confirm that we will be bringing the garden we originally designed for the May 2020 flower show to the special September 2021 RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
We’d designed the garden before the pandemic to stand for the importance of beautiful and restorative green spaces in the places we need them most – our towns and cities.
Now, more than ever, protecting, extending and creating new green spaces in towns and cities has proved such a vital lifeline for people and nature. We believe that there is no corner too small, too unloved, or too battered that cannot be transformed into somewhere tranquil and powerful.
The garden is imagined as a peaceful oasis, pocket park-like in its design, providing respite from a hectic, urban world, and bringing new life and purpose to a long-neglected corner of a city. It is for people and wildlife to share; to come together and enjoy all the benefits of being in nature. Urban settings are rich with history and stories; here in the M&G garden we have referenced an imagined industrial past in the materiality and design, including a metal sculpture, created in collaboration with the architecture and design studio Mcmullan Studio, which weaves through the garden.
Access to nature and green space fulfils a profound, primeval and innate need in all of us, as well as providing wide-ranging health, environmental, economic and social benefits. The garden reflects a changing world – the unprecedented movement of people to urban centres, and the impact of urbanisation and the ‘heat island effect’. As towns and cities develop and expand, green space must be given prominence alongside transport, power and water.
Just as all of our three previous Chelsea gardens (2014 – gold, 2016 – silver gilt, 2017 – gold) have been, this garden will have a second and permanent home after the show.