The Chelsea Flower Show: A History of Controversies

For more than a century, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show has been the most prestigious event in the horticultural calendar — a place where garden design is elevated to high art, where royalty strolls among roses, and where the great and good of British horticulture gather each May to inspect each other's planting schemes. But beneath the immaculate lawns and tastefully arranged blooms, Chelsea has generated a surprising amount of controversy over the years. From questions of nationhood and snobbery to gender inequality, greenwashing, and the enduring question of whether a gnome belongs in a garden, the show has repeatedly found itself in the middle of arguments that go well beyond horticulture.

The 1927 Nationalism Row: "Horticulture Knows Nothing of Nationality"

One of the earliest and most revealing controversies in the show's history came in 1927, when a campaign was launched to favour indigenous plants and British nurseries — and to ban foreign exhibitors altogether. The argument, as the protectionists saw it, was straightforward: the show should prioritise British horticulture and reduce competition from overseas growers and nurseries, who were taking space that homegrown businesses deserved.

The RHS rejected the appeal entirely, issuing a rebuke that has since become one of the most quoted lines in the show's history: "Horticulture knows nothing of nationality." The position was both principled and commercially astute — the international character of Chelsea had been central to its reputation almost from the beginning, and excluding foreign exhibitors would have diminished the show considerably. But the episode revealed how quickly questions of trade, protectionism, and national identity could intrude even into a flower show, and echoes of that debate have surfaced at various points since.

The Gnome Wars: A Century of Snobbery

No controversy in Chelsea's history has proved more persistent — or, arguably, more revealing about the show's relationship with class and taste — than the long battle over garden gnomes.

The RHS imposed its ban on gnomes and "other brightly coloured mythical creatures" in 1912, the very year the show moved to its current home at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The rule was unambiguous: gnomes were deemed vulgar, kitsch, and unworthy of inclusion in a show devoted to horticultural excellence. For the next century, they were kept firmly outside the gates.

The ban generated decades of low-level protest. Gnome enthusiasts in fancy dress regularly gathered outside the showground on opening day demanding equal rights for their beloved ornaments. The most memorable act of resistance came in 2009, when Jekka McVicar — a thirteen-time Chelsea gold medallist — was found to have smuggled a small gnome named Borage into her herb display. Once spotted, RHS officials moved swiftly to have Borage removed. The affair was made more delicious by the revelation that a member of the RHS's own governing council had been implicated in the smuggling operation. The RHS was not amused, though much of the public was.

Critics of the ban argued it was sheer snobbery: gnomes, after all, had once been prized features of Victorian aristocratic gardens before falling out of fashion, and high-quality antique examples were sold to collectors for substantial sums. The ban, they said, revealed Chelsea's real priority — not horticulture, but the maintenance of a particular social image. One defender of the ban captured the attitude precisely, if inadvertently, when he explained that Chelsea was "all about class... ladies wear lovely clothes and the Queen goes along."

The RHS relented in 2013, on the show's centenary, temporarily lifting the ban and inviting celebrities including Maggie Smith and Julian Fellowes to decorate gnomes that were put on display. Two nine-foot white gnomes greeted visitors at the entrance. The ban was then quietly reinstated — only to be lifted again in 2026, this time in honour of King Charles's fondness for gnomes at Highgrove.

The 1950s: Scantily Clad Models and the Question of "Livestock"

One of the stranger episodes in Chelsea's history came in the 1950s, when the RHS Secretary is alleged to have evicted scantily clad models from a rock garden display on the grounds that "livestock of any kind" may not be exhibited at the show. The incident — remembered more as an anecdote than a scandal — nonetheless points to a long-running tension at Chelsea between the show's conservative instincts and exhibitors' desire to attract attention.

That tension would not go away.

Paul Cooper's 'Cool and Sexy' Garden (1994): The Most Controversial in Show History

In 1994, garden designer Paul Cooper created what many consider the most controversial garden in Chelsea's history, a design he called "Cool and Sexy." The garden featured giant photographs of naked, kissing couples alongside a grille that blew jets of air up the skirts of unsuspecting women visitors. The display generated immediate outrage, complaints from visitors, and considerable media coverage. Whether it constituted a piece of conceptual provocation or an act of straightforward harassment depended very much on your point of view, but it made headlines and ensured that the debate about what belonged at Chelsea continued.

James May and the Garden With No Plants (2009)

In 2009, Top Gear presenter James May entered a garden made entirely of Plasticine — flowers, trees, garden furniture, soil and all — created with the help of schoolchildren, war veterans, and animators from the studio that made Wallace and Gromit. The garden was part of his Toy Stories television series, and it was entered, as he put it, to demonstrate that no-one is "too posh for Plasticine."

RHS officials were not enthusiastic. The show's governing council greeted the exhibit with what one observer described as "sideways looks and raised eyebrows," and the RHS notably did not guide the Queen in its direction during her royal visit. The garden was ultimately awarded a special Plasticine medal — a neat piece of diplomatic humour that acknowledged the absurdity of the situation without quite resolving it.

The episode captured something real about the tension between Chelsea's devotion to horticultural standards and the broader public appetite for spectacle, entertainment, and celebrity. May's garden drew enormous crowds and generated some of the most enthusiastic press coverage of that year's show, precisely because it was not a proper garden at all.

The Gender Gap: A Show Dominated by Men

For most of its history, Chelsea has been significantly male-dominated at its highest levels — a fact that has attracted increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent decades.

As recently as 2015, the RHS itself admitted it was concerned that a "disproportionately small" number of female designers were applying to create Show Gardens on Main Avenue, the most prestigious category. Only a third of the almost two hundred show gardens created on Main Avenue in the decade to 2015 had been designed by women, and only one female designer had won Best in Show.

Calls for change came from unexpected quarters. After Andy Sturgeon's garden won Best in Show in 2016, television presenter Monty Don commented on air that it was "very male," adding that while men responded to it strongly, the female presenters on his team were "slightly less enthusiastic." His co-presenter Joe Swift went further, suggesting the RHS should mandate fifty-fifty gender representation on judging panels.

In 2016, Juliet Sargeant became the first Black female designer to exhibit at Chelsea, and she was candid about the barriers she had encountered. She pointed out that she rarely came across other Black garden designers, and that horticulture had not "even occurred to anybody to think about diversity." The response from parts of the establishment was frosty. The RHS selection panel chair described her public comments as "publicity-seeking." Alan Titchmarsh offered the view that gardening is "a great leveller" and "open to all" — a response critics found notably inadequate given the evidence to the contrary.

By 2023, the numbers had shifted significantly: for the first time ever, women outnumbered men among Chelsea's garden designers, with fifty-eight percent defining as female. The RHS celebrated this milestone loudly. But critics noted that this majority existed only in the smaller, lower-profile categories — All About Plants and Balcony and Container Gardens. On Main Avenue, where the largest and most prestigious show gardens are displayed, men still outnumbered women eleven to four in that same year. More men named Tom won Best in Show in the decade to 2026 than women in total, as more than one female designer has pointed out.

The structural inequality, critics argue, runs deeper than application numbers. The costs of designing a large show garden — which can exceed four hundred thousand pounds — mean that securing corporate sponsorship is essential, and that process favours designers with existing networks, profiles, and access. Those barriers have historically disadvantaged women, younger designers, and designers from ethnic minority backgrounds more broadly.

The Sustainability Problem: Greenwashing Allegations

Perhaps the most sustained controversy of the modern era concerns Chelsea's environmental credentials — and whether a show that preaches sustainability can square that message with what actually happens on the ground.

The criticism is not abstract. Designing and building a Chelsea show garden involves enormous quantities of concrete and hardcore being brought in and removed, plants being grown out of season in heated greenhouses, lorries and delivery vehicles idling for hours on the Embankment during build week, and — until recently — wholesale use of peat-based compost throughout. The whole enterprise is, by any honest reckoning, significantly carbon-intensive.

The RHS was slow to respond. Fake grass was only banned from show gardens in 2022. A full peat ban only came into force in 2026 — though critics have noted that this ban is difficult to enforce fully, since around forty percent of nurseries still use peat-based starter plugs, including imported varieties. Concrete-free construction has been encouraged but not yet universally mandated.

When the RHS introduced its Green Garden Audit in 2023, requiring all large show gardens to calculate and reduce their carbon footprint, the results were significant — a twenty-eight percent reduction in carbon emissions across the Show and Sanctuary garden categories — but also revealing. Designers found there was almost no reliable data on which to base such calculations, because no one had seriously attempted them before.

Former RHS Ambassador Tayshan Hayden-Smith captured the contradiction vividly when he noted that the sight of "lorries, diggers, and delivery trucks lining up for the build" jarred painfully with the show's sustainability messaging. The RHS's own stated mission — to be "net positive for nature and people by 2030" — sits awkwardly alongside an event that, as one RHS sustainability official admitted, "can probably never be sustainable in the strictest sense."

The requirement, introduced in more recent years, that all show gardens must be relocated to a permanent home after the show rather than simply demolished has been widely praised as genuine progress. But critics argue it does not address the fundamental issue: that a temporary event requiring this level of material and logistical input, staged annually in the grounds of a Central London hospital, carries an environmental cost that no amount of Green Auditing fully resolves.

The Elitism Question: £137 a Ticket

Running through almost all of the above controversies is a broader question that the RHS has never fully answered: who is Chelsea actually for?

A full-price day ticket for non-members in 2026 costs £137. The first two days are reserved exclusively for RHS members. The show has sold out before public tickets go on sale. A significant proportion of the most prestigious gardens are funded by corporate sponsors — wealth management firms, jewellers, luxury brands — whose involvement shapes both the gardens themselves and the atmosphere of the event.

The RHS is a charity with a public mission, and it argues, credibly, that Chelsea generates the funds and public attention that support its broader educational and horticultural work. The show's television coverage reaches millions of viewers who will never visit in person, and its influence on gardening culture is genuinely democratising in that sense.

But the show's physical reality — a ticketed event in London, priced above the reach of many, surrounded by upmarket hotels and restaurants, attended by royalty and celebrities — sits in tension with claims of universal accessibility. When communities near the showground itself often lack permanent green space, and when the same show features six-figure sponsored gardens funded by private wealth, the gap between Chelsea's aspirations and its actuality is hard to ignore.

A Show in Flux

What makes the controversies at Chelsea interesting is not that they expose the show as hypocritical or failed — it is too good, and too important, for that verdict — but that they map the slow, often reluctant evolution of a deeply traditional institution as it tries to remain relevant in a changing world.

The gnome ban looks, in retrospect, like an institution defending taste as a proxy for class. The gender gap reflects structural barriers that still have not been fully dismantled. The sustainability debate captures the difficulty of reforming an event whose entire format depends on an infrastructure that is, by its nature, temporary and therefore wasteful.

Chelsea has changed — significantly, in some respects — in response to each of these pressures. But it tends to change later than it should, and more partially than its critics would like. That pattern, more than any individual controversy, may be the most telling thing about it.