2 minute read
RHS Malvern Spring Festival
FABULOUS FLOWERS
Last month saw the 33rd RHS Malvern Spring Festival take place at the Three Counties Showground. LISA ROCKLIFFE was there.
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Set against a backdrop of the magnificent Malvern Hills, Malvern Spring Festival is the largest RHS show outside of London, and was a great way to kick off the show season proper.
SHOW GARDENS
This year’s event saw six showpiece show gardens and a further five feature gardens. A new permanent garden honouring the Queen on her Platinum Jubilee was also unveiled. This garden, designed by Jess Russell-Perry, was officially opened at the festival by HRH Princess Royal.
The winning garden this year was The Hide Garden designed by Emily Crowley-Wroe. The garden contained a large garden room that led out onto a naturalistic space with water at its heart. An angled deck area featured sculptural carved benches and looked out over a pebble pond complete with stepping boulders and marginal planting that made it inviting to all wildlife visitors.
New for 2022 was an Affordable Gardens category, created with a strict budget and using plants available in the Floral Marquee, which displayed over 50 handpicked nurseries offering top-quality plants.
The Hide Garden was Best In Show
PLANTS & TRENDS
Many show gardens featured colour palettes of contrasting blues and oranges offered by blue camassias and geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ interspersed with the vibrant lime of euphorbias. Pines and conifers featured heavily, providing strong evergreen structure. In other areas, shade planting took centre stage – striking upright ostrich ferns, perfect hostas and delicate epimediums and tiarellas sat underneath beautiful multistemmed amelanchier and silver birch trees. All very naturalistic and all very beautiful. There was abundant use of natural materials including stone sculptures, willow hurdles and wany edged wood as well as more contemporary options like corten steel and corrugated sheeting.
DEMOS & GUESTS
Malvern had a host of talks and demonstrations on gardening, food, drink and more. Host James Alexander-Sinclair welcomed experts including Monty Don, Arit Anderson and Frances Tophill, there were demonstrations in floristry, qigong and more and in the newly named Nourish Theatre chefs including Raymond Blanc cooked foods from around the globe. There was a lot more than just plants to see!
COMING UP
After Malvern and Chelsea in May there are a further seven shows to look forward to this summer. See the website for tickets and information.
