10 Top Garden Trends at the World-Famous Chelsea Flower Show That’ll Look Fabulous in Your Backyard, Too

Every May, the world’s best growers and garden designers gather for the greatest garden event on planet Earth: RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The 20-acre site in London fills with nearly 400 horticultural exhibits and an unimaginable number of plants – it’s estimated that each show garden has over 3,000 plants apiece. And each year, common threads that appear in multiple exhibits become global garden design trends that affect gardeners all over the world.

It’s impossible to over-estimate the influence RHS Chelsea Flower Show has on the gardening industry. Myriad new products and plant varieties are launched here, and buyers make decisions that define the selection offered to us hoi-polloi gardeners. Celebrities in floral frocks congregate like wasps in a jam jar, their patronage steering what garden goodies we’ll covet most. Sir David Beckham even co-designed one of this year’s gardens, for goodness’ sake, and had a new rose named in his honor.

Influencers swarm over the exhibits, too, sharing Chelsea highlights far and wide across social media. Hundreds of thousands of visitors (sipping an estimated 39,755 glasses of Pimm’s) and hours of TV coverage later, the show’s standout features have been endlessly discussed, deliberated over and decided. And while there’s all sorts of newsworthy chatter about oddball garden moments from outdoor saunas to snooker tables, what I’m really interested in are the strongest trends that translate to actual gardens. And here, dear reader, they are. Whether you're looking for patio ideas, container inspiration or fresh planting palettes, which will become your next backyard project?

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1. Terracotta Tones

The most popular tone at this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show was a soft terracotta, matching the mood of the naturalistic planting to a tee. As well as sculpted clay walls in the Lady Garden Foundation ‘Silent No More’ Garden and burnt-orange planters of the Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden (above), rusty Corten steel, aging copper and clay bricks brought warm, earthy colors across the board. And of course, there were lots of terracotta pots!

All sorts of plant families popped up to show off petals in the terracotta spectrum from bronze to coral to just peachy, with nasturtiums, iris and geums aplenty. Tree bark got in on the act, too, and perhaps the prettiest was the peeling reddish-brown of Betula nana (dwarf birch) in Fettercairn: The Angels’ Share balcony garden.

2. Enchanting Iris

It would be quicker to list the show gardens without iris growing than to list those with. In the Japanese courtyard of the Tokonoma Garden – Sanumaya no Niwa – irises were literally the only flowers among the beautiful moss balls and fern fronds. From the dramatic deep purples of Iris ‘Superstition’ and ‘Black Swan’ in The Boodles Garden (above) to huge bronze-toned Iris ‘Red Pike’ in Trussell’s Together Garden, the opulent petals oozed aloof elegance. And iris will bring the same effortless style to any home border.

There were more bearded iris than any other, considered by many to be the archetypal Iris and loved for their caterpillar-y row of hairs (the beard!) on lower petals. These beauties deserve a spot in every garden and are mostly hardly in zones 3–9. If you’re yet to be convinced, take a look at bearded iris ‘Bernice’s Legacy’, available from Nature Hills, and get ready to swoon!

3. Informal Planting

Gone are the days of formal borders and the style of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show was almost universally a relaxed return to naturalistic planting. Nativars – cultivars bred from native plants – were widespread, and bumblebees showed their buzzing appreciation. Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ (cow parsley) danced its way through many of the show gardens, as did Cistus creticus (Cretan rockrose) and foxgloves in a rainbow of pastel shades.

There was even a nettle in The Whittard of Chelsea Garden!

So loosen up, relax, and add some wildflowers to your borders. Don’t worry too much about the weeds, either: the ‘On the Edge’ garden (above) was created almost exclusively from plants we might pull up from our gardens as ‘weeds’.

4. Solitary Sanctuaries

As we all become more socially connected, the more it seems we crave some alone time – or at least, that’s what garden designers appear to think. Plenty of this year’s show gardens had nooks meant just for one, with a single seat surrounded with peaceful planting. Perhaps the most serene of all was in The Woodland Trust: Forgotten Forests Garden (above), where an armchair sculpted from a block of wood sat quietly among Acer campestre (field maple) and Silene dioica (red campion).

A solitary sanctuary with a comfy seat and sensory planting to soothe the soul? I’ll be starting with this trend first!

5. Rain Chains

There’s always plenty of arid landscaping, drought-tolerant planting and rainwater harvesting to be found in Chelsea Flower Show gardens, and rightly so. But while these concepts are all-important to gardening in today’s climate, we can’t really call them ‘new’. But where all of these ideas converge in a celebration of precious rainwater with a rain chain? That’s a trend set to be huge in 2026.

From an elegant fall of patina-ed Persian copper cups in the Flood Re: Contain the Rain Garden, to a couple of simple rusty chains in the Tales from the Riverbank Garden, water gently trickled downwards here, there and everywhere. My favorite rain chains, though, were in the Hanging Gardens of Botanica where water drip-dripped through vertical columns of terracotta pots planted with Philodendron. Genius!

6. Artfully Recycled Materials

The art of upcycling trash into garden treasure moved a good notch up the style dial at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Without doubt the most beautiful reclamation was in The Whittard of Chelsea Garden, where pipes propped up on spiralling brick stacks fed water into huge copper urns. But many other show gardens were built from repurposed materials, showing us all that secondhand can be even more stylish than buying new.

Old paving was cut up to form paths and used steel rafters fashioned into a canopy in The Children’s Society Garden, and the walls of the Addleshaw Goddard: Flourish in the City garden were made from oyster shell-based concrete. The Transient Garden boasted a scaffold-board outdoor sofa, and The Sightsavers Garden had circular raised beds constructed of bricks, both DIY-doable projects in any garden. So, whatever junk you have stashed behind the garden shed, it’s time to turn it into something beautiful for your backyard.

7. Fabulous Foliage

I reckon 2026 was the year of the leaf at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, as foliage outshone flowers in multiple show gardens. Hardly anyone noticed the fabulous sculptures in The Tate Britain Garden, so commanding were the enormous textural leaves of velvet groundsel (Roldana petasitis) planted in front. And nobody had a clue what the dinner-plate leaves of unusual Boehmeria platyphylla (sycamore-leaf false nettle) in The Asthma and Lung UK Breaking Space Garden were.

The 2026 Plant of the Year, announced at the show, was even a leafy lovely, and everyone adored the moody, magenta-daubed foliage of Hosta RED NINJA. Suddenly having a shady plot to grow the lushest of leaves is top of the garden want-list, though there were plenty of foliage plants at the show for sunny spots, too, with a secondary benefit of shapely shadows cast. Green had never looked so good.

8. Crushed Shells

I’m not sure if there are many shells left in the sea, given how many were used in the Chelsea show gardens. Crushed shells are a sustainable material that’s simply great for any garden, and I found them used to create paths in The Eden Project: Bring Me Sunshine Garden, as a gravel-mulch alternative in the borders of the Addleshaw Goddard: Flourish in the City garden, and as a filler between paving in The Seasalt Painted Garden. Some Houseplant Studios displays used crushed shells as a sparkling pot-topper, too.

If you want to follow suit, you can buy organic sea shell mulch from Gardenwise via Amazon.

9. Mixing Edible and Ornamental

While plenty of show gardens tucked curly kale and bronze fennel into borders full of flowering plants, The RHS and The King’s Foundation Curious Garden was a masterclass in mixing edible with ornamental. Among the delphiniums and sweet peas grew beans and cabbages, with no distinction drawn between room for blooms and veggie-patch staples. All manner of herbs were woven into the tapestry, too, and pistachio, mulberry and pomegranate trees used for structure.

In other gardens, strawberries popped up in improbable places, in between pavers in The Campaign to Protect Rurual England Garden and trailing from pergola rafters in the Hedgerow in the Sky garden. Both the Little Garden of Shared Knowledge and Tales from the Riverbank Garden gardens consummately proved that growing all manner of fruit and vegetables in pots can be seriously pretty, too.

This is such an easy and deliciously rewarding trend to try at home, whether you grow a hanging basket of strawberries or a patio pot of tomatoes. And any veggie varieties that thrive in a pot won’t overtake a border already full of blooms.

10. Cottage-Garden Roses for Pollinators

The dazzling display of David Austin Roses at the heart of The Great Pavilion is a Chelsea Flower Show staple, and you can literally follow your nose to find the perfumed blooms. Every year, the roses get bigger and better, with more and more ruffles of petals – but not this time! While showstopper blooms were still aplenty, an abundance of smaller open-structured roses stole the limelight. Why? Because the big benefit of these little roses is that pollinators can actually reach their nectar.

So many show garden designers had plumped for simple pollinator-friendly roses with exposed centers, too. Even the Sir David Beckham rose, launched at RHS Chelsea and looking divine growing in The RHS and The King’s Foundation Curious Garden, allows bees easy access to its pollen. While this new cultivar has lots of soft white petals, the blooms are deeply cupped so pollinators can fly right in. Just in case you’re curious (I was!), 'Sir David Beckham' smells like a green banana with a splash of an expensive musky aftershave. The bees liked it, anyway!