Shrinking gardens and the younger generation’s lack of interest in horticulture are putting the Chelsea Flower Show’s future in peril, gardeners have said.
This year’s show featured a range of novelties to appeal to the younger generation – including a pleasure garden full of plants associated with love and romance, and a collaboration between the King and David Beckham.
But there remains a disconnect between Gen Z and the 113-year-old show, where ticket prices can surpass £100.
James Whiting, the designer of the Lovehoney pleasure garden, said the show needed to modernise if it wanted to have a future.
Mr Whiting, who earned his fourth gold medal during the awards on Tuesday, told The Telegraph: “Chelsea needs to modernise, and it has been for a few years.
“It’s about ensuring future members. The RHS is a member-led organisation, they have to ensure that the younger demographic want to be part of the RHS, want to be gardeners, and want to come to a show like Chelsea.
“Otherwise, there won’t be a show like Chelsea in the future. People’s lives have changed.”
Mr Whiting’s Aphrodite-themed garden featured a range of indoor plants, pink chandeliers, hidden plant-shaped sex toys and different scent pots in its walk-through greenhouse.
“We’re the young upstarts over here [in the houseplant section], causing a bit of chaos, because we’re not the traditional garden designers,” he added.
The design features houseplants that Mr Whiting said appeal to young people who may not have garden space.
He said: “We garden indoors so much again now. I moved to London 13 years ago and all of a sudden I just had a windowsill, nowhere to grow anything, and I had a balcony next to a flyover in east London that if you put a plant on it, it wouldn’t last a day.”
John Kitchin, who runs independent garden centre Hugo & Green in Brighton and had a stall at the flower show, agreed young people needed to be encouraged to come to the show to preserve it.
“Otherwise, there is a risk”, Mr Kitchin added.
He added that gardens were getting smaller and people were less interested in them when house-buying now – in stark contrast with the older generation.
Some 88 per cent of young people do not feel confident they will ever own a home with a garden, according to a recent LBC and the London Student Network survey.
And 75 per cent said they believed that growing one’s own produce was “a thing of the past”.
Mr Kitchin said: “It’s all socially-linked. There’s a generation that didn’t keep house plants because they had a garden.
“Young people don’t want the trouble of the maintenance; they want a postage stamp where they can sit out.”
Patrick Clarke, who designed a garden on behalf of The Children’s Society, said young people needed to be shown how to cultivate plants.
“I think we’re not doing enough,” he said. “But it’s not a difficult ask. You just need to expose people to the fact that it’s there or the opportunity of it.”
Mr Clarke added that he thought the flower show needed to modernise or its future would be at risk.
He said: “Chelsea could reach out and involve young people where there is the opportunity to do so: Reduced ticket prices for people who are younger so that they can experience a horticultural environment.”
Mr Clarke, an award-winning garden designer and landscape architect who last presented at Chelsea in 2008, worked alongside young people from youth clubs in Bedfordshire to build the garden.
A slightly crooked path winds through seemingly haphazardly placed plants to a bench made from wood with a giant split in it, stitched together with tiny joins, and other furniture made from trees deemed imperfect by companies that would otherwise have been sent for biomass.
The garden was designed around the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi” – the acceptance of the imperfection, Mr Clarke said.
Mr Clarke said he was struck by the disconnect between young people and nature, adding that some of the children he worked with had never walked in a woodland – “they’ve never had that benefit of the gentleness of being surrounded by trees and wooded environments”.
Last year, a study found that two-thirds of Gen Z (67 per cent) and more than half (57 per cent) of millennials stayed at home for days.
Nadia Saddiq, 28, who was exhibiting her houseplants from Botanica Studio, a plant shop in Bath, at Chelsea for the first time, told The Telegraph gardening was at risk if more young people did not get involved.
She said: “I think they need to get more young people in because truly otherwise it’s going to die out. I did an RHS course and I was the youngest person there by a long way.
“I think it’s a shame. Maybe it’s an expensive hobby to have and people just can’t afford to do it. If you’re in a little flat, it is a luxury to have houseplants.”
Kate Cotterill, the founder of heirloom seed company She Grows Veg, said young people have the space, but they just do not know how to garden.
“I think skills is a barrier,” she said. “I don’t think space is – 85 per cent of UK adults have a growing space, and everyone has a windowsill.”