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.
The Sleep in Beauty Garden celebrates the joys of sleeping outside in a beautiful garden. Our gardens are often the backdrops for so many happy daytime events and occasions, but we often overlook their potential in the evenings and overnight.
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 Hierarchy of Plants garden is inspired by the basic need to realise one’s full potential and becoming everything that you can be, as suggested by Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. Often presented as a pyramid, the philosophy categorises our five essential needs: physiological (food, water and shelter), safety, social (belonging), self-esteem and self-actualisation (creativity, achievement).
The garden is a tiered, tropical style garden infused with a variety of cottage garden plants interspersed with lush foliage and textural plants.
The Diamond Way: Cotswolds Estates and Gardens 60th Anniversary Garden reflects a walk around the Cotswolds, but rather than a landscape in miniature, it is an ornamental garden that takes inspiration from many of the quintessential aspects of the area.
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.
In Mirabel Osler’s book A Gentle Plea for Chaos, she calls for a less regimental, more relaxed approach to gardening. Biosis: Mode of Life displays a conscious blurring between the wild and tamed and shows how innovative design is used to garden gently and embrace the wider community that we share our gardens with, echoing Osler’s ‘gentle plea for chaos’.
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.
The Maindee Unlimited: Greening Maindee Gateway Garden is co-created with the community-led charity Maindee Unlimited and their volunteer gardening team Greening Maindee, who aim to transform underused spaces into greener safer and attractive areas for people and wildlife.
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 Garden of the Wind is designed for an art and cultural institution as a therapeutic space that embodies Eastern philosophy and provides a unconventional exhibition space.
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 Rain Garden offers a peaceful retreat from the hustle and bustle of city life, drawing inspiration from the tranquillity and beauty of traditional Japanese gardens. It demonstrates that with thoughtful design and planting, it’s possible to create a space that not only inspires but also addresses practical concerns, such as mitigating the impact of flooding caused by climate change.
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.