The new RHS Flower Show Wentworth Woodhouse, taking place at the grand stately home in South Yorkshire, looks to reflect the rich horticultural history of the mining community in and around Wentworth, the Rhubarb Triangle, community gardening with a strong focus on how to work with what you have in your garden.
With a series of show gardens, installations and floral marquee featuring 52 growers and nurseries, the new show aims to provide visitors with the best in British and international horticulture, with designs encompassing themes of wellbeing, sustainability and the beauty of gardening. Also included is a series of Long Borders where budding designers, community groups or colleges showcase small gardens to the theme of ‘Make a Statement’.
RHS Wentworth gardens and installations
To honour the history of the Fitzwilliam family ownership of the Wentworth Woodhouse estate and a once thriving mining industry, the RHS Miner’s Garden by Chris Myers looks to recreate a time where miners and their families lived in tight-knit communities. The garden will use allotment style planting to represent it’s ability to feed a family, with a natural fringe of wild native trees and wildflowers bordering the garden. Old-fashioned cut flower varieties and bedding plants will be used to transport visitors to a garden of the past.
The RHS Work With Your Garden feature, designed by Matt Biggins and Richard Hill, represents a versatile garden that explores how planting archetypes, from full sun to shade, soil, changes in topography and moisture can be worked with to create a beautiful garden at home. Tackling many of the features and challenges found in gardens across the country, the design will use an unorthodox planting style where plants are chosen based on local nursery availability, continuing into the build where plants will be set out organically rather than strictly following a planting plan.
The RHS Rhubarb by Candlelight installation by Jordan Lister transports visitors into Rhubarb Triangle Forcing Sheds where perennial planting inspired by rhubarb-tones will sparkle under candlelight and the creaking sound rhubarb makes as it grows will be recreated. The sensory delight will be constructed within the chapel at Wentworth Woodhouse and pays homage to the West Yorkshire rhubarb industry.
RHS Teenage Dirt Park, a Feature Garden by Rachel Platt, will create a planted green space inspired by the young people of BMX Rotherham, part of Rotherham’s Children’s Capital of Culture 2025. The garden showcases a horticultural collaboration that is functional, sustainable and engaging. The community garden contains a central structure of dirt tracks for rollers, jumps and berm turns is situated next to resilient meadow planting that is low maintenance with bold, contrasting colourful plants.
The Greenfingers Charity Together Garden by Phil Hirst and Jo Charlton is intended as a private space for parents whose child is in a hospice. Small, intricate plant details distract the attention of visitors while feeling supported and cared for. A predominantly green planting palette with muted flower colours creates a soothing effect.
The Macmillan Legacy of a Lifetime Garden, designed by Pandora Ryan will feature a still water pool flanked by chequerboard paths symbolising life’s journey and the challenges of navigating a cancer diagnosis. Visitors can release seeds into the garden to symbolise nurturing future generations.
The RNIB Legacy Garden by Paul Hervey-Brooks explores living with sight loss, allowing visitors to experience a garden through someone who has lost their sight. Incorporating texture, form, colour and sound, the garden uses highly scented and contrasting colour plants to create an immersive place of safety, beauty and comfort.
Urban Pollinators by Richard Browning employs a loose and irregular planting pattern to create a natural garden filled with mixed perennials to attract depleting pollinators.
Hazlewood Barn|Reimagined by Bestall & Co by Lee Bestall aims to give a second life to reclaimed materials, creating a landscape that is designed to cope in a changing Yorkshire climate.
Resembling a pathway into a modern art museum, Garden Whispers by Hyeyoung Choi and Yungil Choi blurs the lines between nature, art, and architecture. Four specimen trees underplanted with a diverse mix of summer-flowering perennial plants grouped by colour families will create a painting resembling what lies in store for visitors attending the fictional exhibition.
Young Designer Gardens
The Young Designer Gardens will also be featured at the RHS summer show, providing the opportunity for young talent to kick-start their careers with debut garden designs. Drakkars Drift by Luke Coleman draws inspiration from the striking basalt columns of Fingal’s Cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, Scotland. The garden features Scandinavian themes and a vibrant, “moisture meadow” scheme that weaves statement specimens into a resilient, wildlife friendly tapestry that evolves through the seasons.
The Dune Garden by Jacopo Ducato Ruggeri takes from the wild, resilient beauty of Fire Island and its legacy as a queer refuge. The planting responds to the site’s contrasts: soft grasses, primroses, and wild roses meet bristly thistles and the needled forms of pine, beneath which a mosaic of sea heath spreads.
Honouring the rich heritage of ceramic making at Wentworth Woodhouse and across Yorkshire’s Rockingham Pottery, A Potted History: Echoes of Rockingham by Sam Dryell contains soft Crataegus blooms, woven textures of herbaceous colour, and the gentle sweep of Yorkshire hedgerows. The garden aims to paint a picture through planting to celebrate this area’s cherished artistry.
