The Chelsea Flower show will explore new territory later this year by featuring the first underwater garden in its 111-year history.
The Seawilding Garden will feature the world’s only flowering sub-aqua plant – seagrass.
The marine plant will feature in a 3,000 litre (660gallon) visible to visitors through the walls of a perspex tank.
Underwater gardens have featured in song, such as the Beatle’s Octopus’s Gardens and TVs in the adventures of Spongebob Squarepants.
But they have never featured at the RHS event before – and never before have gardeners had to use snorkels to cultivate a Chelsea garden.
The UK has lost around 95 per cent of our seagrass meadows but efforts are under way to bring it back around Britain’s coasts.
And after the show the seagrass will be replanted underwater, helping to mark the first time a Chelsea Garden has gone on to become an underwater habitat.
While little known to many of us the plant is an unsung hero in the battle against climate change and in supporting fish and other marine life who shelter in it.
The Seawilding Garden (pictured) will feature the world’s only flowering sub-aqua plant – seagrass
Seagrass is a true plant, shedding leaves in the autumn, regrowing in the spring and flowering and setting seed in the summer
The garden will feature sandstone rock outcrops, a saltwater pool, a pebble beach and areas of bog. Pictured: King Charles at the Chelsea Flower Show
The garden’s designer, Ryan McMahon, of Musa Landscapes said he was inspired by the charity Seawilding which are helping to restore seagrass at Loch Craignish, Argyll and Loch Broom in Wester Ross.
‘What seawilding are doing is effectively gardening but underwater they go to the sea loch with a trowel and a snorkel and wade out and dig up rhizomes,’ which are used to grow more seagrass on tanks in land, to be later returned to the seabed.
Quite unlike seaweed – which is a type of algae – seagrass is a true plant, shedding leaves in the autumn, regrowing in the spring and flowering and setting seed in the summer.
Worldwide, seagrass absorbs around 10 per cent of the world’s CO2 even though it only covers 0.2 per cent of the ocean floor.
It also helps stop coastal erosion, binding the seabed with its roots and slowing the impact of waves as they hit the coastline.
But it needs clear water to thrive and has been harmed in recent years by pollution and sediment in the water blocking out the light around the UK coast and worldwide.
The garden will feature sandstone rock outcrops, a saltwater pool, a pebble beach and areas of bog – as well as rare plants never before seen at Chelsea such as string sedge, which favours marshy ground.
Mr McMahon said that even though the loch looks like ‘a beautiful wild space it is sadly quite lacking underwater’ as so much seagrass has been lost.
Worldwide, seagrass absorbs around 10 per cent of the world’s CO2 even though it only covers 0.2 per cent of the ocean floor
The garden is hoped to inspire ‘new conversations’ about restoring seagrass around the UK and worldwide. Pictured: Guests view the Forest Bathing Garden, winner of the Chelsea Best in Show, in 2024
He added that as biodiversity will also help Britain’s fish populations if we can grow more of it around the coast.
The garden is hoped to inspire ‘new conversations’ about restoring seagrass around the UK and worldwide.
Mr McMahon concedes that it is not the sort of thing an ordinary gardener could do but the techniques pioneered by Seawilding will help efforts to regrow seagrass round the UK.
He said: ‘Seagrass meadows are great nurseries for commercially viable fish species we eat’.
Seawilding has planted 400,000 seagrass seeds and restored 350,000 native oysters to Loch Craignish alone.
In another first, like the Seawilding Garden, sponsored by Project Giving Back, the show will feature a British rainforest garden.
The garden will highlight the threatened Atlantic temperate rainforest habitat which once swathed western coasts of Britain, the island of Ireland and the Isle of Man.
The garden by designer Zoe Claymore will feature a raised wooden walkway snaking over moss-covered ground past a tumbling waterfall, lichen covered birch trees, a rare royal fern and bluebells, marsh marigolds and foxgloves, backed by a fern and moss wall spanning the eight-metre width of the garden.
