UK: RHS Chelsea Flower Show sold out
Ticket sales have been the most popular since 2014, with more being sold by this point in time than the last three years.
Nick Mattingley, Director of Shows at the Royal Horticultural Society says: “Selling out now demonstrates the appetite for the new content and the innovations at Chelsea this year, including the BBC Radio 2 Feel Good Gardens; a ‘secret garden’, which can only be viewed from an elevated position, and an urban street art mural, incorporating plants and art.
“It’s going to feel like a very fresh, pioneering and exciting RHS Chelsea Flower Show.”
For the first time visitors will be offered an elevated view of a ‘secret garden’. The edge of the Linklaters Garden for Maggie’s is a 3m high hornbeam hedge, which contains gaps where you can glimpse a beautiful garden. The only full view comes from a raised position at the back, which, for the first time, visitors will be able to walk along.
The Chengdu Silk Road Garden combines architecture and planting. Huge multi-coloured sculptural fins representing a Chinese mountain range create an extraordinary spectacle. The Bermuda Triangle features an erupting volcano – another first at Chelsea. A palm at the centre of the volcano erupts from four sections of laser cut aluminium sheeting illuminated by purple and red LED lightings, while a Perspex sheet surrounding the garden mirrors the whole design.
More new sights for RHS Chelsea will be found in The M&G Garden 2017, which is situated within a Maltese quarry, with two giant Maltese lime stone pillars, some 8 metres and 5 metres high. With special permission from the Maltese government, the garden will feature some unusual and specific plants that are unique to Malta - Euphorbia melitensis, Salsola melitensis, Limonium melitense, Matthiola incana subsp. melitensis.
New content this year also includes the five BBC Radio 2 Feel Good Gardens, which will show how plants can enrich and indulge one of the five senses – touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. The gardens also celebrate BBC Radio 2’s fiftieth anniversary and are named after different BBC Radio 2 Presenters.
Light-emitting concrete, made up of 80,000 fibre optic cords to allow light to shine through it, in Kate Gould’s multi-tiered ‘City Living’ urban garden and a transparent wall made with metallic rods as high as a double decker bus (4m) are two of the urban and cutting edge enterprises at Chelsea this year. Street Art will also feature for the first time in the metropolitan RHS Greening Grey Britain Garden.
Nick adds: “Growers, designers, landscapers and all exhibitors are really pulling out the stops and pushing boundaries. In challenging times we’ve grasped the opportunities that have arisen and are delighted with the line-up.”
In total there will be 28 Gardens and over one hundred plant displays in the Great Pavilion, the jewel in the RHS Chelsea Flower Show crown.
Nick finishes: “As RHS Chelsea has now sold out, we would strongly urge people not to buy from touts and websites, which sell tickets illegally and at extortionately high prices, as you’ll probably be refused entry to the show.
“Instead, we’d recommend buying tickets for the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show at the start of July.”
RHS Chelsea Flower Show kick-starts the British summer season and attracts around 165,000 visitors to its central London location every year.
For more information:
www.rhs.org.uk/Shows