Held on the 8th – 11th of May, this year’s RHS Malvern Spring Festival will focus on ‘Plants and People’, looks to inspire gardening for both inside and outside, bringing a sense of wellbeing and make a positive contribution towards combating the effects of climate change.
Showgardens
For the 2025 RHS Malvern Spring Festival, eight show gardens aim to offer a new approach to gardens and fresh look at the natural landscape.
- Midlands-based designer and former international Taekwondo champion, Kate Mason will be presenting ‘The Hierarchy of Plants’, a tiered, tropical-style space featuring cottage garden favourites interspersed with foliage and textural plants. At its core is Mazlow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, which includes the basic need for individuals to realise their full potential, and it will perform an educational role showing how to overwinter tender and tropical species. The garden is being built by Radial Landscapes and Hide Landscapes, based in Surrey.
- Emily Crowley-Wroe’s show garden, which will be rebuilt at a prominent yet neglected and unloved site close to a major road in Newport, South Wales. The ‘Maindee Unlimited: Greening Maindee Gateway Garden‘ will show how even the most unlikely spaces can be revitalised to become greener and more welcoming to both people and wildlife. Drawing inspiration from two of the area’s iconic Art Deco buildings, and featuring a trompe l’oeil mural wall created by local artist Andy O’Rourke, Cotswolds-based Crowley-Wroe is co-creating the garden with Ruth Essex and the community-led charity Maindee Unlimited and its volunteer gardening team, led by landscaper John Stone.
- Established East Midlands-based designer Ian McBain will be celebrating the joys of sleeping outside in a beautiful garden with ‘The Sleep in Beauty Garden’. It will feature a bed beneath an overhead structure with a living roof and stargazing panel, along with trees providing dappled shade. The garden will be cement-free and make use of recycled and repurposed materials.
- A water-wise, rural garden making the most of captured rainfall filtered through a blackthorn tower into a wildlife pond is the essence of ‘Biosis: Mode of Life’ designed by Frantisek Zika, Jenny Rafferty and Jim Goodman of Shropshire-based Humble-bee Gardeners. They will be blurring the wild and tamed, with a mix of medicinal and edible plants and recycled materials, to increase biodiversity.
- A Cirencester-based landscaping company will be marking a milestone with ‘The Diamond Way: Cotswolds Estates and Gardens 60th Anniversary Garden’. Designer Luke Gunner draws inspiration from features and the landscape of the Cotswolds. A ford-style ‘splash pool’ will feature, in which visitors can dip their toes and plants such as lamb’s ears, Stachys byzantina, that reference the contribution of the wool trade.
- Television director and newly graduated garden designer from the London College of Garden Design, John Howlett, will present ‘The Rain Garden’, inspired by the changing climate and flood risks faced by urban environments. This garden offers a peaceful retreat from city life, drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese gardens, featuring a monochromatic colour palette, the calming sounds of water and soft rustling of grasses and birch trees. The garden will be relocated to Coppermill School in Walthamstow, where it will provide a much-needed solution to the school’s flooding issues and shade for the children, while helping to connect local biodiversity with the surrounding landscape and the nearby Walthamstow wetlands.
- ‘St Godwald’s Retreat’, a space for reflection and mindful retreat, designed by Marc Harbourne-Bessant and built by F.B & Sons, Lawns & Landscapes, will be moving to Primrose Hospice & Family Support Centre in Bromsgrove after the festival. Ancient crafting techniques and recycled materials will be used to reduce the carbon footprint of the garden, which seeks to transport the visitor to a space removed from modern life. The Japanese concept of a ‘wind telephone’ offers the opportunity to speak with a loved one that has passed, carrying words across the wind, while a memory tree from the Hospice carries names and stories of loved ones.
- Yun Sunmi and Lu Wenjuan’s ‘Garden of the Wind’ will offer visitors the opportunity to experience the wind from various perspectives; they can listen to the rustling of leaves, observe the dynamic movements of plants and enjoy artistic drawing that capture the movement of the wind. In Korean, ‘Wind and Hope’ are homophones and the design plays with the idea that when the wind blows in the garden, visitors feel a sense of hope and confidence. Sunmi and Wenjuan’s garden is designed for an art and cultural institution as a therapeutic space that embodies Eastern philosophy and provides and unconventional exhibition space.
Feature Gardens
- ‘Hedgerow to Home’, designed by RHS gold medal winner Jamie Langlands, will show how plants that grow naturally in wild spaces can be incorporated into gardens, bringing beauty, benefiting wildlife and biodiversity and blending harmoniously with the local landscape. Being well-suited to a region’s climate and soil conditions means they’ll thrive with much less effort in terms of watering, fertiliser and pest control and have increased resilience to fluctuating weather patterns.
- ‘Grain to Garden’ will bring together plants and human experience, with a naturalistic garden surrounding three repurposed crop silos five metres high and four metres wide. These agricultural structures will be transformed to create immersive spaces: a lively bar, a disco and a tranquil retreat with a fire pit. This collaboration involving Pershore-based TASK Academy and its founder, landscaper Rupert Keys, and designer Cherry Carmen will be “a fun and exciting space to walk through” and show how raw, industrial heritage can be woven with nature to breathe new life into gardens.
Indoor garden inspiration
The Festival of Houseplants, in collaboration with Green Rooms Market, will be back and is accompanied by the first RHS-judged Indoor Plant Gardens to recognise ways in which plants can bring beauty, joy and health benefits indoors.
- ‘Neo Flora’ by Megan Warren-Davis of Forest Interior and John Tallis of Outdoor Living Gardens seeks to highlight the rising levels of anxiety and depression amongst teenagers by creating an urban space that reflects this mental state. A grunge, cyberpunk styled bedroom forms the backdrop of this thought-provoking Indoor Plant Garden, representing the chaotic, tumultuous mental state experienced by an increasing number of children and teenagers, whilst the contrasting greenery of houseplants represents the teen’s newfound interest in the calming, positive and wellbeing influences of houseplants and the ways they can improve mental health.
- Dibleys Nurseries will demonstrate that whatever the indoor space, nature can be brought in providing all the benefits of houseplants. Modern eco grow-lighting and self-watering containers will allow a variety of houseplants (all grown and propagated in their nursery) to flourish, from lush green foliage to bright pops of colour from Steptocarpus ‘Dibleys Patricia’ and ‘Matilda’, inspired by the early modernist artist, Marc Chagell and his bold colour palette. This indoor plant garden will show that with the right mix of colour and texture, any room can be transformed into a vibrant, energising environment.
- London-based Emma Angold’s Indoor Plant Garden ‘Nice Day For a Green Wedding’ demonstrates how houseplants can be used creatively as spectacular wedding reception centrepieces, backdrops and personalised placeholders for guests. Emma’s indoor plant garden aims to highlight more environmentally sustainable ways of decorating for weddings, which in 2024 was said to produce 180kg of waste per average wedding, including single use flowers and décor.
- Jessy Edgar of Sprouts of Bristol and Ferne Glannan-MacRae of Ferne Creative, both based in Bristol, will collaborate to bring ‘Beneath the Canopy’ to RHS Malvern Spring Festival. This indoor plant garden will take visitors on a whimsical journey through a slice of the Amazon Rainforest, demonstrating how to provide the right care for tropical houseplants and celebrating the complex beauty of this richly diverse, but highly threatened part of our planet. The design recreates the feel of the Amazon Rainforest’s dense understory with layered planting that mimics the natural structure of a rainforest environment.
- Johnathan Balchandani and Mohammed Bhula will collaborate to create ‘The Sensory Sanctuary’ – an immersive, indoor oasis designed to reconnect visitors with nature. Visitors can explore a misty swamp pond surrounded by cascading vines and vibrant plants, while natural soundscapes and fragrant flowers enhance the experience. Inspired by tropical jungles and the restorative power of sensory engagement, this indoor plant garden demonstrates how indoor gardening can foster mindfulness, relaxation, and a deeper connection to nature.
- ‘A Reflection of Nature’ is the mastermind of GrowTropicals, Claire Lowrie of The Jungle Haven and Ben Newell of Worcester Terrariums, and brings together their collective expertise of rare and unusual plants, terrariums and indoor plant care in a design which displays a reflection between an outdoor tropical space and indoor living area, where the various growth habits of plants are mirrored. Their indoor plant garden will show visitors how to take inspiration from nature and understand the needs of different plants, creating visually dynamic and easy-to-care-for plant displays at home.
- ‘House plants: a long view’ by Reading-based Midrib Plants aims to demonstrate the history of houseplants in the home set against the backdrop of a typical living room of a Victorian terraced house, juxtaposing modern, vintage and Victorian influences representing a ‘magpie’ approach to curating a home.
- ‘Contemporary Living | A Modern Retreat’ by Botanical Interior Design of Nottinghamshire will incorporate contemporary 3D-printed planters created using a plant derived material, alongside air purifying plants and multifunctional furniture designed to encourage relaxation, meditation and creative pursuits. Inspired by a post-pandemic need for mental health sanctuaries, the design encourages visitors to slow down, breathe deeply and immerse themselves in the restorative power of indoor nature, fostering a sense of calm and well-being in the midst of an often-chaotic urban life.
