Explore RHS Malvern Spring Festival’s 2025 Show Gardens
The eight Show Gardens offer an invitation to take a new approach to both our gardens and, fittingly for a Festival surrounded by beautiful Malvern hills, a fresh look at the natural landscape around us
Take inspiration from RHS Malvern Spring Festival (8-11 May 2025) and explore your garden’s potential. Whether it’s making planting choices for climate change as well as aesthetics, using your garden at night or just taking a moment to be aware of the movement and elements around you. Discover the designs welcoming adventurous minds.
St Godwald’s Retreat is inspired by the life and times of St Godwald for whom the church in Bromsgrove, local to the Primrose Hospice, is named. Using ancient crafting techniques and influenced by the landscape surrounding the Primrose Hospice, the garden transports us to a space removed from modern life.
Within the wattle and daub gazebo sits a ‘wind telephone’ – an opportunity to speak with a loved one that has passed, the wind carrying these words out through the stone portal and into the world beyond.
A king-sized bed sits beneath a glorious overhead structure with a living roof and a star gazing panel. Multiple trees create a wonderful feeling of dappled shade, and the calming and relaxed planting will feature the shade-tolerant plants which are so often the ‘unsung heroes’ of our gardens.
The garden is a tiered, tropical style garden infused with a variety of cottage garden plants interspersed with lush foliage and textural plants.
A covered seating area is designed around a church lychgate, and the water feature represents a stone-sided watercourse with a ford crossing, beside which is a bench, designed to look like a stone footbridge.
This is a rural, water-wise garden, circulating captured rainwater from the green roof of a bee wing-inspired pergola, and filtering through a blackthorn tower into a wildlife pond.
A striking trompe l’oeil –‘to deceive the eye’ – mural wall created by local artist Andy O’Rourke provides an engaging and colourful backdrop to the garden and runs along a main path, which is enveloped and softened by planting. The garden draws attention to how the most unlikely of spaces can be revitalised into greener, more welcoming spaces through community initiatives.
The wind in the garden can be experienced in different ways: through the sound of the rustling leaves and the sight of their movement in the breeze and in the artworks throughout the space. In Korean, ‘wind’ and ‘hope’ are homophones, and the garden plays with the idea that when the wind blows in the garden, visitors feel a sense of hope and confidence.
The garden’s design features a monochromatic colour palette of whites, greens, and subtle bronze accents, guiding visitors through a sensory experience. The calming sounds of water, rustling grasses, and birch trees create a tranquil, relaxing atmosphere.
