Kate follows in royal footsteps with Chelsea Flower Show debut
Duchess of Cambridge joins list of royals who have commissioned garden designs at the annual event.
The Duchess of Cambridge is not the only member of the royal family to stage a garden for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
The B&Q Sentebale ‘Forget-me-Not’ Garden by designer Jinny Blom aimed to raise awareness of work to help children who are victims of poverty and the HIV/Aids epidemic in Lesotho.
Blom said it symbolised Harry’s loss over the death of his mother and represented a memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales. It won a silver gilt medal.
In 2015, Harry took a keen interest in another Sentebale garden – this time by Matt Keightley, who took inspiration from a children’s centre the charity was building in Lesotho.
In 2002, his Healing Garden – dedicated to his grandmother the Queen Mother in the year of her death – was awarded the Silver Flora medal in the Best Show Garden category.
In 2001, the heir to the throne also scooped a silver medal for an Arabic-influenced Carpet Garden, which drew on his interests in Islamic culture.
The royal family visit the Chelsea Flower Show each year en masse.
They will use wild planting and natural materials to provide visitors with a “sense of wonder and magic”.
But the event will not be Kate’s final foray into show gardening.
She will also co-design two further RHS Gardens with the same team, maintaining many of elements from the garden at Chelsea, for the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival in July and the RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey in the autumn.
