RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 Ep4 | Gold Medal Gardens & Garden of the Year

Hello and welcome back to RHS Chelsea. It's medals day today. Now this is the big day and all the designers and growers are about to discover what the judges think of their creations. There's no doubt that emotions have been running really high across the showground as they find out if all the years of hard work and dedication have paid off. I think the one thing one has to remember is that it doesn't matter what medal they get, what type of garden or status, people have no idea how much work has gone in and everybody has done the same amount of work. Yes it's blood sweat and tears isn't it all the way and because not only for them but for their team as well. Oh yeah I mean it's a big thing. Well across the next hour we'll be sharing the standout moments from medals day as well as exceptional garden design ideas and exquisite plants for your gardens. Coming up tonight on the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026, an event supported by Range Rover. We will be unveiling the Chelsea garden that is set to breathe new life into one of Britain's iconic seaside towns. Adam will be getting back to basics with some clever design ideas to transform your garden. Frances explores the smaller gardens to discover how a network of green skills within the horticultural community has inspired designers on their way to medal success. And it's the moment everyone's been waiting for, which garden will be named RHS Chelsea Garden of the Year? Well we'll be surprising the winning designer at the end of the show. But first we're here on the Killican Co, a seed in time garden designed by Baz Granger which has been awarded a gold medal. It's a wonderful garden and there are lots of things to like but in particular as someone whose garden floods regularly, I'm fascinated by the way it handles water. It's got a wetland here in the middle, all the water funneling down into it. Really interesting dealing with a growing problem. It's a clever garden. I like this brutalist architecture. Made out of straw isn't it? Made out of straw and clay. Brilliant. Very clever. Time now to find out how the other designers on Main Avenue fared. Here are the all-important medal results from the large show gardens. It's been another strong year at RHS Chelsea with five golds on Main Avenue. First to be awarded a gold is the Tate Britain Garden designed by Tom Stewart-Smith. It's a showcase for the forthcoming Claw Garden at Tate Britain and clearly it impressed the judges. Also winning gold is the Lady Garden Foundation's Silent No More designed by Darren Hawks. It's a conceptual, bold and imaginative garden raising awareness about gynaecological cancers. Winning gold is a huge accolade but I think just being at the show is actually what we all come here for. Returning to Main Avenue for the second time is Kazuyuki Ishihara, renowned for his exquisite Japanese planting. This year he was awarded a silver gilt for his Tokonama Garden. The designer Angus Thompson has created the Breathing Space Garden for the charity Asthma and Lung UK, an ambitious design that encouraged us all to stop and take a breath. This was awarded a silver medal. Also awarded silver was Arit Anderson for her garden for the charity Parkinson's UK, her first on Main Avenue. It's designed as a sanctuary to support those navigating this complex neurological condition. We put as much energy into this as we can and we really hope that the public are going to enjoy it. The designers Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis have been awarded a silver gilt for their garden, the Eden Project Bring Me Sunshine that celebrates the regeneration of Morecambe Bay. Well it's pretty 18 pretty intense days of course on site, crack of dawn to the end of day, we're overjoyed to be here. And celebrating her 20th year at Chelsea, legendary designer Sarah Eberle has been awarded gold for her garden for the Campaign to Protect Rural England that shines a light on the overlooked countryside at the edges of our towns and cities. People think because I've already got 19 golds it gets easier, it doesn't, it gets more difficult, there's more jeopardy, so I'm absolutely thrilled. I'm hoping to be back soon, maybe not next year but the year after I'm really hoping to be here and I'm very excited about that. The thing to remember is that all medals are a mark of excellence, a gold medal is absolutely outstanding and all the other medals are a recognition that these are special. They don't have to give any medals to the gardens, we take it for granted, but nothing here should be taken for granted. All of them are really superb and I think especially so this year and this gold medal garden is the Children's Society Garden designed by Patrick Clarke who is making his debut on Main Avenue this year and it is inspired by a childhood walk in the Peak District. He's attempting to recreate the magical atmosphere of the countryside but in the heart of the city and I do think he succeeds incredibly well. It starts at the back here of the garden with a damp area, slightly shady, lovely rich planting. I love the touches in the corner of the ferns and the water moving and you've got the digitalis and the geoms there and this backdrop of reclaimed material sets the tone and as you come through the planting changes slightly. You've got more reclaimed materials but it's becoming more urban, it's becoming sparer, there's still the water is running, there's fantastic rills, I love a rill, it always works well and as you come through following the water line it turns a corner and comes into a very modern pond and the planting around it is spare, it's almost austere, but this is an urban garden, this is an urban garden, reclaimed materials and it's working, it's taken us through on their journey. Now I've got with me the designer Patrick Clark. So Patrick, I know you're an experienced designer, you reminded me that we'd first crossed paths 25 years ago at Hampton Court but this is your first Main Avenue garden I believe. It is, it's my third Chelsea garden but it's my first Main Avenue garden. And you've got a gold medal, I mean it doesn't get better than that. Oh it's amazing, I mean just incredible, I mean we're where we want to be and that's so important. Now obviously children are a really important theme of the garden but I think it's more than that, have they not been involved with the creation of it, what we see here? Yeah they have, we've been doing workshops over the last few months up in Leyton Buzzard where the garden will be relocated to, so we've done different creative workshops, one of the workshops we've done has been to make fused glass and these beautiful glass elements you will see up above you in the steel structure, contained within the steel structure. Congratulations, it's fantastic. Oh thank you so much, thank you. Right, from a garden that has been inspired by the Peak District, we're now going to one that's set to transform a coastal community in the northwest. The Eden Project Bring Me Sunshine garden provides a taster of the huge regeneration to come for one of Britain's oldest seaside towns and we joined the designers in Morecambe to find out more. I'm garden designer Harry Holden and I'm architect Alex McAdis. We're co-designers of the Eden Project Bring Me Sunshine garden for this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show and ultimately that's named after Morecambe's son Eric Morecambe who would have been 100 years this year. So this is going to be my third Chelsea garden and yeah it's the biggest yet so I'm really excited to be getting back there. And this is my first garden and I'm looking forward to the madness. The inspiration for this garden really is all about trying to engage and educate young adults in horticulture so we're trying to look to the local landscape which is a really inspiring place to all the different plants that are growing here locally and also the plants that might be growing here in the future as well. Chelsea is the first stop on the journey for this garden and afterwards we're going to be rebuilding it here at the New Eden Project Morecambe, right on the coast and right now is really an unloved space and we're going to be creating a 1.6 acre public realm community garden. This coastal meadow is just going to be thousands of meters squared of it. I mean we have something like 30,000 plants coming into this spot alone. We can have died plants, medicinal plants, perennial foods. Yeah. Showcasing what can you do in a really elemental coastal location like this but ultimately here you know it is making it show garden size. Every single element in the garden will find its home here when we move it to Morecambe. So we're bringing the seaside into the design in the structures and they are based on mussel shells with solar panels on top to power various elements of the garden and we're using lots of things that are going to challenge us like clamcrete which is this sort of concrete mix using shells mixed into the concrete. So the concrete uses in it is very small but we have the legs of the structure made in this. The challenges of working in this location it's very harsh conditions so Harry's challenge is really to make sure that the garden looks fantastic all year round using the right plants. Our challenge is to work with structures that can also be used by the community all year round and not be destroyed by the conditions. So challenges here with the garden is the fact that it is public park and it's a community garden so it's really important to bring the community into that process so that there is that ownership and that care and love of it but then also you know it needs to service as this place that's going to take millions of visitors through this beautiful garden to enter into Eden and over the past few years we've been doing loads of amazing workshops. By bringing this new garden here it's the first sort of little green shoots of hope and positivity and pride back to Morecambe. So in our process of engaging with 20 different community groups over all of Morecambe Bay everybody just kept saying you need to speak to Yak. Yak you're clearly the man to bring in to help us connect to the community here and I mean tell me about your journey in Morecambe. You know having grown up here and certainly being a youth and community worker for the last 30 years I was absolutely committed to supporting you because I know you know what kind of projects like this can do to transform young people's lives. Over the last decade or so we've seen real decline in opportunities I mean I'm excited by the prospect of Eden being built. Let's cut ourselves to 10 years time what does look Morecambe look like to you? I mean if you look at the beauty looking over the bay and just see how stunning that is you know the idea is that if we can turn that 180 and see the town replicate the beauty of that bay that would be amazing achievement you know seeing the town prosperous and more importantly making sure that we have so many opportunities for young people and the wider community. So we've done a whole host of different workshops and then ultimately hopefully those skills will empower some young people to get jobs here at Eden or and work in green industries locally. Greenfingers is a real hub for the community and it's got a strong connection to Eden and it's a place where a lot of social prescribing and horticulture therapy happens so it's a perfect venue for us to do some horticulture skill development. Right so we're going to be planting out these whips and these are Populus tremula which is a type of poplar so this is a plant that that can take quite a lot of wind and will really start to create that what is called a shelter belt and that will just help to buffer the wind as it comes through where we're then going to be growing our productive plants our kind of coastal orchard and all these different species in that kind of growing zone in the community hub. It's a really special opportunity to be doing workshops over the past couple years with lots of different people from Morecambe and an amazing group of young adults here who are inspiring to sort of get into those green industries develop skills in horticulture and I think it's just been an amazing journey we've all been on together. I think the Eden project will bring more job opportunities and more visitors to the area. Most people I've spoken to are very keen on local involvement. I hope it does improve Morecambe bring a bit of life back to a ghost town really. Gives me general hope for the future. It's exciting to be planting trees and making it happen. And this spot right here is just such a beautiful spot right by the coast. Incredible ecology and incredible communities that's what this garden is all about tapping into. What we hope from bringing this garden from Chelsea is a legacy but also the community feel that's theirs. Ultimately Eden is all about regeneration. This is coming to Morecambe here and I think if anything the successes of Cornwall will show that this place is going to feel very different in a few years time. And what a truly uplifting space this is. Look your eye is carried right up through this poplar tree with the leaves just sort of sparkling in the wind. Beautiful. And then the contrast of the stillness of this water and this extraordinary structure right in the centre. I must say Alex and Harry you have made an amazing garden and you've won a silver gilt medal which is fantastic. How was the whole process of bringing it to Chelsea? I mean it's quite a ride as you well know. Absolute roller coaster but incredible to be here with such an amazing array of different teams of experts in their fields of landscape associates leading the build and it's 18 very full-on days but incredible process. Yeah and you're here and it's all been worth it. Tell me a bit about this clamcrete because I think that's really interesting combining the shell with the concrete. So I mean yes the clamcrete we've used on the floors and on each of these sections here it's a mixing clams from Morecambe region with very low carbon concrete mix and it's a very effective way of building in different areas in the country with different aggregates rather than pure cement which is really not that great. And of course Morecambe is the sort of the other character in this garden isn't it because it's so specific to that place. Yeah and everything here is from Morecambe in so many different ways and as Alex says about the clamcrete those waste products from the Morecambe seafood industry the limestone boulders even this polished table that limestone so ultimately when it goes back to Morecambe if it was just left for decades it would just crumble back into the landscape that it came from and this boundary quite literally brings the landscapes of Morecambe to life at with a journey from the coastal scenes through to the more inland rocky scenes created by the artist Finbar Ward in collaboration with the young adults that we've been working with so beautiful to see it here. And of course it's going to live on in Morecambe so a great future ahead of it. I mean the most extraordinary garden I hope we're going to see you on main avenue again. Well over in the Great Pavilion the growers are also celebrating phenomenal medal successes with over 60 golds being handed out this morning but as Carol knows only too well to achieve the highest horticultural accolade the devil really is in the detail. I'm here in the Great Pavilion and it's medals day but what does it take to get gold? I'm going to find out. Myles huge congratulations. Thank you. A gold brilliant. It's my fourth Chelsea I got silver in the first year two silver gilts and this year gold. This is a really interesting display but you're not in the usual category the floral range are you? No so this is judged as a Lindley display which is educational this is all about growing Acer from seed. So all your trees are in tip-top condition what would you advise for anybody trying to grow an Acer? So if you're growing in a pot which a lot of people do make sure they don't get too dry but also make sure they have good drainage so they don't get too wet in the winter and site them somewhere with not too much sun ideally morning sun afternoon shade. Congratulations to Warman Harbour their beautiful Alliums have won gold for the 21st time and they've only been coming for 38 years and look at the quality of the flowers. If I can have a favourite it's this one it's called Spider and it's a cross between Shubertii and Atropopurium and if you want something a bit more straightforward how about this Purple Sensation and Purple Sensation in particular will sell seed all over the show so you'll soon have a garden full of it. Blackmoor and Langdon have done it again their nursery is 125 years old this year they've been awarded over 80 gold medals what an achievement. Cavert Garden plants specialise in alpines they've got 11 golds already and this is their 12th they clearly love their plants and know exactly what they're doing. Dominic congratulations your very first time at Chelsea and you've won a gold medal. Yes we've done very well it's been my dream since I was a child to try and come to Chelsea but get a gold was never on my list. So tell us about some of these orchids are most of these suitable for growing at home? Yeah so anyone can grow any of these varieties at home we've got Phalaenopsis, Dendrobiums and Oncidiums they're quite easy plants you want to ideally water it around once every 10 days rain water is better than tap water. And how do you keep it looking so fresh here? We have to spray it multiple times a day but some of the time when it gets into the summer months and it's the hottest shows you're going to do it three or four times a day. It's just extraordinary I bet it looks good at the end of the week soon. Fingers crossed thank you. Congratulations to everyone on their medal success and on a day like this it's important to stop and consider all the people behind these exquisite medal winning exhibits and the years of effort and endeavour that's gone into creating them. The students have been involved in creating the design and planting this exhibit for Sparsholt College and just look what they've achieved fantastic planting here I love that rhythm so you get the different shapes and sizes as you go down a beautiful use of colour too and a sense of humour it's clear to see that there's a thriving horticultural network working really hard to develop green skills and pass on knowledge to the next generation and the same can be said outside in the gardens as Francis has discovered. Professional gardening comes to some of us later in life and the routine is not always obvious but young inspirational designers are finding their feet and growing careers. This is a lovely little garden to sit in it feels like a very enveloping space and everywhere you look there's beautiful drips of vertical water and obviously the sound that that brings with it. The copper theme is also really lovely it's an eclectic mix of stuff but with that greenish grey tone everywhere even on the stone floor it ties the whole space together. The planting is also quite green and quite lush and quite romantic this is clearly a young designer who really understands spatial design but storytelling as well I feel like I am sitting in somebody's garden so Ollie Pike you have created the Wittard of Chelsea garden here so how did you get into this career? Yeah I just stumbled across it really on an open day at university and yeah just discovered this amazing course about landscape architecture which was all about nature and making things which are two things that I really love and yeah I'm really passionate about helping young people learn about plants now I tutor at university sometimes at Sheffield where I learn. This is the Young Minds garden by Charlie Chafes and it is a really nice place to be despite being quite small and prominent when you're here you feel very enclosed and the planting is beautiful greens and yellows with arids at the front things like aeonium and sephora and then coming back into this more woodlandy space it's a very lovely place to be. So Charlie your first Chelsea garden? That's right my Chelsea debut really proud of the team that helped me do it and all the young people that helped me along the way. So that's something that you're obviously passionate about and what this garden really is about isn't it? I like to say that there's a whole gardener's education in this small space so we're learning about care of evergreens learning about deciduous trees we're learning about ecology. So what's given you this bit between your teeth to advocate for young people in horticulture what's your own sort of horticultural history? My household was a deeply creative place as a child but it was also instilled with the sense of wildness. Cut to 10 years ago 2016 I volunteered on my first Chelsea garden and it was just there that I saw this amazing community of growers and of designers and of skilled people coming together to create these amazing gardens and that's what actually got me into horticulture but my single biggest teacher of design has been the act of gardening. I believe that to be a creative process and working with plants getting my hands dirty. So what's your hope for the future with young people and encouraging them into horticulture as a career? The most sustainable thing we can do is to invest in the minds of the future generation. I don't think it's always just about using recycled materials it's about educating people in design and also in ecological methods and that's actually what this garden is designed to do. Well many congratulations to them. Now every year the president of the RHS Keith Weed picks his own favourite exhibit from across the show ground and this year he's chosen the exhibit from Siena Hostas which is where we are. Which is where we are. Now I mean the wonderful thing is the question I'm asked more than any other is how do I stop snails and slugs eating my hostas? I know well I've grown them in a pot I mean all of mine are in a pot and I only grow four at the moment. Do you? Yes but I'm on the lookout for some of the scented flowers. I didn't know there were something. There are a few. I'm sure there must be one. They're very unusual yes. Well still to come tonight on the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 and events supported by Range Rover. Join us as we take you on a journey to the rugged landscape of the South African Cape to meet a man who's made it his mission to share some of the planet's most unusual and beautiful plants. And the poet Lem Sisse will be joining me to share how nature has inspired his award-winning work. Jamie disappears into a horticultural paradise of roses, magnolias and clematis to get excited about the huge diversity of plants on one exhibit that we can all grow in our gardens. And tonight we will be surprising the designer of the garden the judges have declared the RHS Chelsea Garden of the Year. I can't wait to hear it it's always a big moment but first with water features proving increasingly popular one aquatic plant nursery in Lincolnshire is certainly riding that wave as we recently discovered. Ponds are very calming. Ponds give you a lot of satisfaction. It's just that tranquility of a pond. You can get a variety of different flowers and they give you a real architectural beautiful pond to want to sit around. I'm Dawn Fisher from Lincolnshire Pond Plants. We're a family-run nursery and we have thousands of different varieties of plants. So we get the oxygenators. They generally live below the surface and they're keeping your water clean underneath. You've got your marginal plants. They're really good at hiding the edges of your pond. They allow things to climb in and to climb out but they also look stunning. And you've got your rafting type plants. Your rafting plants are ideal for your frogs and your newts. The rising popularity in ponds has meant that we've had to increase our business size. We were originally in smaller polytunnels but now we've gone to purpose-built greenhouses. So this is greenhouse six. This is the sixth one of our glasshouse roots. So it's a mixture of native and non-native plants in here. Here we have Manyanthus trifoliata. This is a rafting plant and it's also known as a bog bean which is a cute name. It is native but it has the most amazing fringed flower on top of it. They are absolutely stunning. Irises are really good at filtration and this is a native iris and it's called an iris pseudocorus, a yellow flag iris. It goes into your pond. It can cope with about 20 centimetres of water over the top of the pot. It is an emergent plant so if you're trying to encourage dragonflies they need something tall and emergent to come out of the water and it produces a flower and then when that dies you get a second one after that. This is one of my favourites. It's a Ponergitan. It's known as a water hawthorn. It floats very much on the surface like a water lily. It flowers for about 10 months of the year. It has these stunning flowers and they're white with these beautiful little black stamens in the middle and if we had smelly vision it smells absolutely beautiful. The cypress papayas is absolutely perfect. The beauty of these is if you want a statement plant and you want to see something completely different to what anybody else is going to have in their pond, this is the plant to do it. With their lovely big pom-pom heads they stand really tall. They can get even taller than this. The only way really to encourage more wildlife into your garden is by having water and pond plants. You're going to have all the natural predators coming into your garden so you're going to have the birds. They're going to come and eat some of the insects but you're also going to encourage the ladybirds that are going to eat all the aphids in your garden. You're encouraging the amphibians. They'll eat the slugs so therefore we won't have to do any spraying anymore. So we're going to naturally keep our gardens completely healthy. You don't need a large garden to have a pond. You can create a pond in anything. Small containers, old sinks, pots that you put on a patio. Even in a small pot you will still find that the wildlife will appear. So this year we're attempting something that's never been done before at Chelsea. So with our pond that we're creating we're going to have it planted up so that people can look through the window. The problem that we've got is it's three meters by 11 meters on either side cascading down. They have to mirror each other because otherwise it's going to look really odd as you look down to the pond. We haven't actually built any ponds yet so I'm hoping it all comes together in the end. My son is in charge of building the pond and I'm not quite sure how that's gonna go. I'm excited about Chelsea because it's a new challenge and I love a challenge. Here is the display from Lincolnshire Pond Plants and it's an absolute showstopper and it won a very well deserved Golden Globe. Dawn you must be thrilled with that. I am. It took a lot of work to get to where we are but it's turned out absolutely fabulous in the end. You really did make life difficult didn't you? You've got these huge tanks of water. What was involved in actually setting them up here? So we had to get the metal first because it has a metal frame underneath and they needed welding so the welding wasn't too much of a problem. Getting the metal was the problem and then we spent all weekend welding it together. My son and another chap from work, Darren, and then what they had to do was they had to get the outer shell folded but then they managed to break the machine and then they were ringing me while I was at Malvern going we broke the machine, we are going to get it fixed, we are going to sort it. So it's been a bit of a journey getting here. Just a little bit. Well it looks absolutely magnificent. I love these little waterfalls. Tell me a bit about the plant and pick out a few of your favourites. So planting wise I wanted to show that plants can be architectural and they can be just as beautiful as they are if you're looking in a garden and they don't have to look scruffy they can still attract wildlife. So some of the ones that I really like are the Carex Mace, the Carex Grey Eye. It's got like a little mace seed head on the top. Really beautiful and ideal for your dragonflies but also acts like a little filter system on your pond. It's clever isn't it. What about the the iris with that lovely mauve flower? So the irises that you get, there are a mixture of ensata irises but the Louisiana's as well they last for such a long time when they're flowering so they flower and they stay in flower for about a week so it's a lot better than like your yellow flag irises which go within a couple of days. Well look it looks absolutely amazing. So many congratulations to you and everyone who put it together. Thank you so much. RHS Chelsea attracts people from all walks of life drawn by the world of inspiration that plants and flowers provide. Like my next guest tonight Lem Sisay who's one of Britain's most acclaimed poets, writers and broadcasters. Welcome Lem, welcome to Chelsea. Have you been here before? It's my first time, first time. Okay so what do you make of it? I'm loving it so far, I'm absolutely loving it. It's quite beautiful, it's nice to be in this calmness. I've got to say now I feel like I'm in the garden. Yeah well this is the privileged thing. Now I'm really interested because your story is well known and not always for the right reasons. I mean you had this fairly traumatic and disturbed upbringing, shunted from pillar to post, abandoned and feeling left out. One of the things when I read it, was there ever any connection with a garden or plants or the outside world? Was that important to you? I was brought up Monty in Ashton in Makerfield which is in the national news at the moment and across from our house in my foster family was the flower park as we called it and it's still there to this day and in the front garden was a giant, it's just a post, what do you call, postal stamp garden but there's a giant laburnum tree in the bottom left corner that was pushing up the sandstone wall at the bottom and that cast shadows into my mum and dad's bedroom upstairs, like really scary kind of shadows with the lamplight on the other side of it. That connection to place, I mean what I'm interested in really reading your story is this feeling of out of kilter, of being an outsider, of not being accepted. Was nature accepting you? Did you feel connected with that? I went out for walks when I was in the children's home to clear my head and that was in the fields of Lancashire, fields that surround Atherton, that surround the children's home. There was a gardener and a garden in a walled garden in my first children's home which was called Woodfields. All of the homes were named after nature, Woodfields, Oaklands, my last place was Wood End. Are you a gardener now? I want to say that I am and I know that I'm not. But you're not. No, I'm not and you know I'm here for ideas. Are you going to read us something? Oh yes. You said you would, I'd like that. Yes, a poem. This is, well, this is about... We don't have enough poetry at Chelsea. By the way, I always feel that all the best gardens aspire to poetry. Without exception, they need poetry. It's about butterflies. Okay. It's a children's poem. Okay. The Emperor's Butterfly Maker. When I read this, I'll tell the children that there is a butterfly maker outside of every town. You don't know about it but he's in a little shed and he makes butterflies and all the young people will go, no, no, and I go, it's okay, you don't have to believe me, but there is and there is this moment where they go, yeah, and it's just holding on to that moment. I can see my grandchildren with exactly that face, yeah. The Emperor's Butterfly Maker. I work at the butterfly making factory on Butter Lane in a town called Fly near a city called Flower. Every day I stick on the wings and I watch them flip from my fingers. Their wings sound like cats purring as they lilt and loop away. Maybe I'll try the wings myself. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you. Across the week, Adam is going back to basics to show us how the design ideas at Chelsea can be transferred to our own gardens. Well, tonight he's turning his attention to one of the key components of any successful garden design, the humble path. I think at times we can underestimate the importance of the garden path. So, let's set the scene. We're going for a walk, we arrive at the woods, there's no path, but we're going into the woods anyway, but where do our eyes go? Straight to the floor because we're worried about where the next step is. We have a lovely day, but we go home, we go back the following day, but I've laid a path all the way through the woods. What happens? Your head comes up, you start to engage with what's around you, you enjoy the space a lot more. Right, now we're off for a walk. I've lost count of how many gardens I've been to and I'm chatting to people and they've said, oh yeah, we decided to put a path into the shed at the weekend. So, that's exactly what we've done. Bang, there's a path to the shed. We need to work out why we're adding paths to our gardens. Yeah, it might be to the shed. Is it a path that's going to be used every day? Very, very occasionally because all of those decisions affect that final design. So, now we've made some decisions, we're really starting to design. What I would say, don't just go out and buy the materials, get it on a piece of paper, you know, measure up your garden, start drawing lines. I mean, this is wonderful, all right, so there's a big strong path, bang, all the way through. Those sets, they drive the eye, but at the end there's a beautiful laser that becomes a focal point. You're not looking straight away at the shed. You imagine every single day I'm walking along this path, I have to engage this beautiful pine, maybe a seat, just a moment to pause, you know. See, paths are important. Next thing is to work out how you want your path to feel. You love those really strong driven lines, or like this, soft flowy movement, and then how wide. The wider the path, the more comfortable you're walking down, arm in arm. You just bring that path in, it becomes thinner, you create a moment of tension, it slows that movement. I suppose the last thing is materials. This is beautiful and smooth, means I'd come out here on bare feet, you know, but chunky gravel, again, you engage differently, it slows that movement. So there you go. Hopefully, if you fancy creating a new path this weekend, you've got a few more ideas. Now it's time to head to South Africa's Cape region to find out how one exhibitor goes to extraordinary lengths to bring a slice of his beautiful homeland to this corner of SW3. I'm in the southern point of Africa, the heart of Fynbos, and here we have floral kingdom that's unique to anywhere else in the world. There's so much colour, there's so much detail and textures in this landscape, special plants, the enormous biodiversity of so many species, and this is my playground. I'm Leon Kluge and I'm an international landscape designer, botanist, plant lover, and I'm going to take this splendor that we have here 6,000 miles to the centre of London for the world to see. This is the King Protea, South Africa's national flower, Protea sineroides, and probably one of the most iconic Proteas we have. The King Protea is one of our most important flowers for the display at Chelsea, not only because it's such a big, grand flower, but there are also a lot of variants. You get red and pink and white forms of it. So as beautiful as this King Protea flower is, we do not pick any of these wild flowers for our display at Chelsea, so she can stay here in the wild and hopefully her seed will be germinating in the years to come. So this is quite exciting. It's very early in the season, so it's unexpected to see this Protea in flower already, and it's called Protea repens. It is full of sugar, and when you tip the flower, you get that sugary substance, and it's really sweet. So the climate here can be really extreme, and that is where the name comes from. Fine bush, fine bush, needle-like leaves, everything in miniature, because the plant needs to protect itself. In the fynbils, we have fire. As destructive and scary as it might seem to us as humans, it is such an important part of creating a healthy ecosystem and the biodiversity of fynbils. The plants here have adapted over hundreds of thousands of years to fire. So I decided to have fire as our main element in the garden. I can't believe how the greenery is already shooting out after this fire that we had. And that was only last year November. It was a very fast-moving fire, but look the amount of regeneration that's coming back. It was like a reset button. Plants hold on to the seeds and wait for the fire, and that's when they only drop the seed after the fire. So fire is needed every 10 to 15 years, so that the light can flitter into the ground, so that new growth can start coming up. Because if she releases the seed in a normal year, and the seed fall to the ground, there's no sunlight there, so they will never grow. Too much competition and not enough nutrients in the soil. Isn't this gorgeous? That is what's so amazing about restios here in the Cape. They are so architecturally strong and beautiful, but at the same time soft. And it takes your eye line from underneath all the shrubbery in the display, right above the proteas. This is Leucodendron Selegnum. It's also part of the protea family. The main reason I use this Leucodendron in our display at Chelsea, is because we have a lot of dark black charcoal in our display, and what better way to contrast that with this almost flaming foliage of yellow. We use about 30 different farmers from around the country that specializes in certain species of proteaceae and fainwoods to give us our flowers. I'm in the Friendship Valley here in the Cape, and currently I'm on a farm called Glenwood. They specialize in a very famous fainbush species, and it's this. This is called ceruria florida, or commonly known as the blushing bride. So the buds of the flowers are just starting to unhinge, and that's the signal that we need to harvest it now. Immediately all of these stems will be packed in boxes. There's about 400 cerurias in a box, and this year we're going need about 10 boxes, and then they will go into between two and four degrees all the way from the farm right through to when I open the box in London. So this is the design, and it's called Life After Fire, and on the one side we have the fire element, and that's filled with a lot of skeletons of old proteaceae that's been burned. Lots and lots of bulbs are going to give loads of color, and it's color that is fire related. There's also a little stream with a little bit of carnivorous plants and moss starting to peep out, but once we move past the merger on top of the mountain where the fire stopped, there the proteaceae come to play, and they enfold flower. So the garden will be divided into two, the burnt half, and then the mature fendles after the fire. I want to showcase the world, our floral kingdom, because for one time only in a year, nowhere else will you see such an explosion of proteacean fendles than at the show. And they've made it. Here is the stupendous exhibit, the Flora of South Africa. Leon, apart from anything else, apart from the beauty of the plants and the extraordinary range, it's such a feat to put this together. Was it a major operation? We kind of pulled the boat out, yeah. It was logistically a little bit tricky, because all the flowers are flown in from South Africa over here, and with all the logistical issues with the planes these days and flight cancellations, we almost weren't here. Really? Yeah, so luckily we made it just in time. Well, you more than made it. I mean, it does look incredibly impressive, and I know it's a really important story, both to you and arguably to everybody to understand. But just to reiterate, fire is at the heart of this, but it's a fire that is doing good, a fire that is benefiting the flora. It's essential, essential for fanebills, really. And the past season was really hot summer in the Cape, and the fires were rampant everywhere. And there were a lot of media attention to the fires, but mostly in a negative way from a human perspective. But from a plant's perspective, especially the fanebills, there's a much positive narrative to it. And it's essential for the fanebills to have a fire, a cyclical fire, like every 15 years, to go through the landscape so that it's kind of a button to reset the landscape. Well, I've been to the fanebills, and I have seen it after fire, and I have to say it didn't look quite as floriferous as this. You've condensed it down. Yes, I have. But, you know, if you look closely and you sit down on the sand, you see so many different species. How many flowers are on the display? About 15,000. You won a gold medal. I did. And the best exhibit in the Great Pavilion. It's so special. You couldn't have done better. Yeah, and my heart's still beating. Well, congratulations, so well done. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for sharing it all with us. It's a pleasure. Now, whilst we would struggle to grow many of these plants here on the display in the UK, although surprisingly quite a few, Jamie has been to discover a huge floral exhibit packed with plants and flowers that you would be likely to find in any garden centre that you visit over the bank holiday weekend. This is the largest exhibit in the Hall of the Marquis, and it's won a gold medal for the second year in a row. This is a tapestry garden. It's a modern take on a cottage-style garden. We've got prunuses back there. That's brilliant for small gardens. And then we have this most fantastic corn that's holding the whole space together. This is a really clever idea. This is essentially a vertical allotment. It's a tapestry patchwork of edible plants. We've got sage, thyme, and even strawberries growing in here. So in an evening, I can just come out of my garden, pick what I want, and take it with me. A shady corner can be one of the most challenging areas of a garden to find the right planting for. But here, rather than trying to fight it, they're embracing it. This is the perfect example of why it can work brilliantly. It's about using layering and textures. We have Wilimia nobilis, which is so rare, it was thought to have gone extinct in 1994. And then the beauty of layering is bringing the plants all the way down to ground level. And you've got this mix of foliages and textures, from the rejercias at the back that are loving being splashed by this waterfall, and then the dryopteris, the ephyraeums. Foliage-heavy, perfect plants for a shady corner. Choosing the right plant for the right place doesn't just apply to outside the garden, but also inside as well. Filling your inside space with greenery is so important. Choosing plants like these orchids in this vertical wall is such a clever idea. Begonias in these baskets, ferns and ivy, it's really clever. Every summer seems to be getting hotter, and finding plants that don't just survive in these conditions, but thrive in them, is becoming really important. And this corner of the garden is a brilliant example of plants like thymes growing through the cracks in the paving. Beautiful agapanthus that adore being baked, and salvias that are going to give you colour right the way through the summer, to transform it into a beautiful paradise. Now it's time to reveal which of the gold medal winning gardens on Main Avenue the judges have decided should be awarded the RHS Chelsea Garden of the Year. And we wanted the award to be a complete surprise for the winner, so we went undercover and engaged in some subterfuge, didn't we Monty? Yeah, well we did. My job was to distract the winner and make them feel they were having a normal interview with me about getting a gold medal, and why not? And meanwhile I was backstage with the RHS Director And here's the moment we surprised the winner. Sarah, many congratulations. Thank you. Another gold medal. Now you, who this still makes you the sort of greatest gold medal winner in the history of Chelsea, they still feel good? It feels wonderful, and in some ways the more medals, gold medals you have, the harder it gets. You know, I'm getting older, have I still got it, am I able to do it? And also in some ways I have a level of expectation on myself as much as anything. And for this garden, I mean you've, this particular garden I know is a passion of yours, the Countryside. It's interesting, I spoke to you the other day, but speaking to other people, everybody has picked up on the way, the way you've used the planting, this naturalistic planting. And it seems to me that we've moved on from celebrating weeds and wildlife as completely wild, and then absorbed it into a garden vernacular. Absolutely. Was that deliberate? Yes, deliberate, and it's kind of the style that in many ways doing many Chelsea gardens and others have led me to. This actually is the real me. Well, while Monty is keeping the winner busy and occupied, Claire and I, we're just sort of hiding in the background, and we're just waiting for the right moment. No idea how they're going to react. Okay, okay, let's go now, let's go. Whether it's a garden, or it's what we might call a wilder landscape, there is a level of management in it. And I don't think it's an either or, it's about bringing plants together. Thank you so much. Oh my goodness me. Wow, look everybody. This is thanks to a brilliant team behind me, so thank you to them. I'm sorry for the deceit. Well, it seems it's worth it. Oh wow, you completely fooled me there. And so, I mean, having won gold, having won best in the show, what do you think it turns out? I mean, is it tricks of the trade? Is it the fact that you've been doing this so long that you now are a master and know how to do it? Sort of, there's a mixture of all of that. You know, I'm a bit sort of, I'm experienced at it. I know about working with people. Working as a team is the key to success. Bringing them on board, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and it's knowing how to work with them. And people are as passionate as I am. But hey, hey, I don't know. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Monty. It's such, don't drop it. Well, she was very happy. I have to say that I'm always really worried that they're going to turn round at the wrong moment, but you pulled it off very well. Or drop the vase. Yeah, well, there is that. That wouldn't be good. Right, well, we're going to answer some of your questions now, so Monty, go ahead. Well, let me unlock this machine and see. Here we go. This is why we're gardeners. Yes, we're going to start. Fliss on Instagram have said, I have allium rust. At least, I think that's what she says, because I've got my glasses off. Here we go. I have allium rust. No ideas why, because they've been in for years with no trouble. What's happened? Allium rust is a fungal problem. It affects all alliums, so leeks and onions, as well as decorative alliums. But we've had such a wet winter, and it's been so relatively mild, that the spores from the fungus have stayed in the ground. I'm afraid the best thing to do is to pull them up and burn them. But if they are decorative, you could just remove the leaves and burn those. Good advice. Yeah. Right, if you only had £20 to spend on seeds for a summer garden, what would you grow for the biggest impact? Well, £20 doesn't go as far as it used to, does it? I think I would do something that I tried last year, which was, I sowed lots of different types of cosmos, just to see the different cultivars, how they were. And it was fantastic. It was such a beautiful display. A really good one is the orange one, polydor, and it's something people don't think of with cosmos, and I highly recommend. Give it a try. And yeah, they're a plant that keep on giving, too. They're wonderful. Okay, I think time for one more. Pity, because we've got more than that. Bronwyn via Instagram says, what are the best tips for integrating edible plants into our garden or borders, or into planting? So it looks beautiful, loan names, and ticking every box. I like adding chard to borders, rainbow chard, yellow chard, Swiss chard, and climbing beans do really well. Yes. You know, they look good. They taste good. Broad beans look great, too. Good flowers, too. Yeah. So all that will work. Well, I'd love to answer more. We are actually running out of time, but please keep the questions coming in, and we will try and answer as many as we can. Well, Monty's absolutely right, because that is it for tonight. Nikki and Angelica will be back tomorrow on BBC One at 2pm, when they'll be opening the vote for the BBC RHS People's Choice Award. And the winner is entirely decided by viewers' votes, so the decision is in your hands. And you should vote. Do try. And I will be back here on BBC Two at eight o'clock tomorrow evening with Arit, and we will be exploring the many ways that you can express creativity in your garden. I'm also going to be talking to Dragon's Den star Deborah Meaden about her own love for the great outdoors. But until then, bye-bye. Bye.