At the show The sun baked down at the showgrounds of this year's RHS Flower Show at Tatton Park. We uncover the wonders of design and planting that were on display, from prehistoric bedding schemes to African houses raised high on stilts.

In this article

Show gardens Back-to-back gardens

Floral Marquees National Flower Bed Competition

The heat was certainly on at the RHS Tatton Park Flower Show, where no fewer than ten gold medals were awarded to show gardens, equalling last year's all-time record. This was the eighth RHS show at Tatton and, as the sun shone down on the tranquil parkland setting in Cheshire, it proved to be one of the hottest ever, with temperatures well above 30 degrees on most days.

The RHS had reorganised this year's layout of the show into a grid system, freeing up enough space for a massive new double floral marquee. Standards were as high as ever, from the spectacular show gardens to outstanding exhibits from the country’s leading growers and nurserymen, to the cheerful bedding displays in the flowerbed competition.

Summertime... and the living was easy in Tatton's show gardens. Outdoor living brought saunas, hot tubs and spas into the garden, and seating areas were large and luxurious.

The winner of Best in Show, 'The Four Elements', was, like many of the gardens, centred around water. Here a stunning water feature used copper tubes to run water with the gentlest of sounds into a pool. This was echoed in the copper bark of a single Prunus serrula in the centre of the garden, and the dense ochre and orange planting scheme complemented it perfectly.

Ochre was the colour of the moment, and was used by many of the gardens with orange and reds or among muted grasses to create some beautiful warm planting schemes.

'Out of Africa', a gold-medal winning garden designed by Louise Ward and Lucy Hunter, also used the sandy colours in the hard landscaping, with a trodden sand path leading up to a raised wooden treehouse.

Lucy Hunter was overcome by her gold medal. "I can hardly speak," she says. "For it all to come together and be how you saw it in your head, and then have someone come and say 'this is fantastic' with a gold medal, it's quite amazing."

If this was all a bit too hot for you, there was plenty of cool planting. "Where Paths Cross" won a silver-gilt for husband-and-wife team John and Barbara Biddulph, who designed the garden for leukaemia charity the Anthony Nolan Trust.

This was a thoughtful, contemplative garden with a strong structure of interconnecting paths symbolising the bringing together of leukaemia patients and the donors who can save them. The cool blue of the background wall picked up in the planting, while white agapanthus and silver-stemmed birches turned the temperature down even further.

This was their first show garden, and they were delighted withtheir medal - but it had been hard work.

"It gradually crept up and up and took over our lives for the last two and a half weeks," said Barbara. "Our two children didn't know who their parents were."

The back-to-back small gardens at Tatton this year kept up their reputation for creating something different. These small spaces were packed with original, modern ideas and the designers took pride in challenging perceived wisdom about what can be done in a garden.

Among the modern gardens, black-and-white schemes featured in minimalist planting. In 'Simply Stone' (Silver-gilt), the white paving slabs used in the flooring, in-filled with black pebbles, marched on up the walls. There were more chessboard effects in 'The Energy Oasis' (Silver), which featured a remarkable water feature using mirrors floating on a black pool to create the impression of a chequerboard floating just beneath the surface.

Water features were also highly original. In 'The Contemplative Garden', designed by Chris Zbrozyna, the water leapt upward into the steel tube fountains. It won the garden a gold medal and Best Back-to-back Garden.

In 'Inside Out', another gold medal winner, the table was also the water feature, with a cascade streaming from the underside into a pool below. The black, granite-like material used in the hard landscaping was made from recycled coffee cups, and the garden included built-in water butts and concealed recycling bins.

The must-have plants for the back-to-back gardens this year were ferns, from majestic tree ferns to tiny, delicate Adiantum venustus. The garden that took this most to heart was the green oasis of 'pteridomania' (Silver), named for the Victorian craze for collecting ferns. But building and maintaining a show garden for shade-loving, moisture-loving plants during a heatwave was something of a test for designer Robert Frier, who submitted his plans in November when high temperatures were the last thing on his mind.

"We didn't realise it was going to be this hot," he says. "We had to cover up most of the garden for most of the week. But it was the coolest garden in Tatton!"

View the medal winners

The talk of the show this year was the new double Floral Marquee. The RHS had created a new space by reorganising the layout of the site, and the exhibitors made the most of it in a fantastic display of the best plants the country’s growers and nurserymen can produce.

"I think it's great having us all together," says herb grower and exhibitor Jekka McVicar. "Despite the heat, the plants have performed magnificently - it's as if they haven't been through this heat."

Jekka's Herb Farm this year featured a tiny fragment of a knot garden, packed with herbs and laced with brick paths under a tiny iron archway. It was an exquisite garden and earned her a gold medal.

Other displays not to be missed were the impossibly big alliums from WS Warmenhoven from the Netherlands, and the fabulous orchids from the British Orchid Growers’ Association. South West Carnivorous Plants created a suitably steamy climate for their wonderful display, a moss-covered log over a pool from which cascaded the brooding, purple-lipped pouches of Nepenthes 'Miranda'.

If the marvels of the Floral Marquees left visitors wanting even more, the National Plant Societies Marquee also proved popular. This was a plantsman's paradise: many rare and hard-to-find varieties rub shoulders with their more commonly-grown cousins, and this was the place to hunt for those must-haves, from acanthus - two new varieties were on show - to streptocarpus. Even the Prince of Wales joined in: his staff at Highgrove House exhibited some of the Prince's National Collection of hosta and broad-leaved beeches.

Schoolchildren at Tatton

There was a playful air about some of the gardens at the RHS Tatton Park Flower Show this year, which could be something to do with the hundreds of school children who had a hand in designing and creating many of the gardens.

The 'Stepping Forward' garden, one of the back-to-back gardens, was created with the help of pupils at St Brigid's School in Denbigh, North Wales, and which was recreated at the school after the show.

Paul Page, the principal designer, distilled his bronze medal winning design from drawings done by the children. He had to choose between hundreds of ideas - from chocolate rivers (considered somewhat impracticable) to the grassy steps that featured in the design. The children helped with everything from painting parts of the garden to raising plants. He said a child's eye view of a garden had been "great fun" to create.

"There are places to hide - you’ve got the den in the corner, where you can hide and look through the waterfall," he said. 'And then there are the steps where you can climb up and look over the garden from a high viewpoint".

Another back-to-back garden, 'Into Africa', won a Gold Medal for Egerton Primary School, from Knutsford, Cheshire, which linked up with another school of the same name in Kenya to create a colourful African garden inspired by Masai warriors.

Two of the main show gardens also included children from the start. Gold medal winner 'A Healthy Future' takes the five-a-day campaign as its theme, and worked with schoolchildren from two Manchester city primary schools who were due to merge into one next year. The children each made a tile that featured in the garden, and raised many of the plants themselves. 'The Plot' (Silver) also drew together pupils from 11 infant and junior schools in three counties to create an edible - and highly decorative - garden.

A long-standing and very colourful tradition at Tatton is the final of the National Flowerbed Competition, in which local authorities and communities put together a flower bed reflecting their own identity.

The resulting display was a superb demonstration of what is possible to do with bedding plants. These supremely colourful pictures were a celebration of traditional municipal planting at its best, and competition was fierce for the RHS medals awarded to each exhibit.

There were some spectacular examples at this year's show. Mansfield District Council recreated Kingsmill Viaduct in houseleeks and begonias for its display, while on the Stockport Borough Council stand there was a canal lock filled with blue pansy 'water'. Of note were the dinosaurs on Scarborough's stand, and the lady - made entirely out of bedding - taking the waters at Cheltenham Spa.