Meet the 7 Garden Tribes looming large at the Chelsea Flower Show

Popular Flower Types

Brighten the landscape with bold tropical flowers and bronze-tinted foliage. This rhizomatous annual thrives in mixed borders, mass plantings and containers.

These showy summer-through-fall blooms are easy to grow and a magnet for pollinators. Rudbeckias are available in many varieties, including single-stem, spreading and tall types.

The Garden Aesthete

With his navy cotton Nehru jacket, hair combed in a side parting and a jaw line as chiselled as topiary hedge, the garden aesthete is unmissable. Once an architect, now a landscape designer, he has an eye for style that spans all disciplines and genres. This is the (lightly tanned) flower man – sharper than a dandy but with the same eye for style. He’s alarmingly informed when it comes to latin plant types and reels them off liberally (and proudly). The garden aesthete is the hipster of the garden world – and he’s found himself, literally, at Chelsea this year.

The Plant Bohemian

They live, they love and they garden – even weeding is carried out with a whimsical nonchalance. Their garden is a meadow of perennials and their god is Piet Oudolf. With a pashmina wrapped around their shoulders and a floaty ethereal dress – it’s Florence and the Machine meets horticultural heroine Vita Sackville-West. You can’t miss her.

Helena Bonham Carter – who is pictured here at the Lulu Guinness lunch to celebrate the opening of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show – belongs to the plant bohemian horticultural tribe

David M. Benett/Getty Images

The Mother of the Bride

Armed with an iPhone and espadrilles this woman seeks one thing: #weddinginspo. Her daughter is out of the country – at a wedding in Paxos – so she is taking on the Flower Show solo. Flowers in the hair? Check. Confetti options? Check. Clever use of moss? Check. She’s been tasked with introducing herself to this year’s Royal Arch designer, Lucy Vail (who has been billed as ‘the new Willow Crossley’), with a sheet of bullet-pointed questions. With a fabric cutting of the agreed colour palette and a monochrome photograph of the wedding of Nancy Beaton and Houston Smiley (in which Constance Spry-designed flowers were beautifully wound round the bride’s dress), this MOB has a lot to get through. Spot her with a furrowed brow and walking at rocket speed, in a striped shirt, plump hairband and large over-the-shoulder taking photos of absolutely everything.

The Flower Show Tragedy

Source: tatler.com