What happens to a show garden when the show ends?
Updated: Oct 1
A show garden has a short life on the showground. You spend months designing it, weeks building it, and then it stands for a few days in front of a lot of people. Then it comes down.
What happens next isn't left to chance. Rehoming is a big part of the RHS's commitment to sustainability, and you work with them to put a rehoming plan together. They have support to help with it. So I always knew Between Chaos & Order wouldn't end in a skip. The real question was where it should go.
The garden was about the gap between structure and irregularity: a formal raised border, a granite standing stone, a still pool, and planting that kept trying to escape the lines. It felt wrong for something about growing and change to just stop.
I chose Gamesley because it was the space that would get the most value from it. I asked the Bureau, the charity that looks after the community across Glossopdale, where the planting would benefit most. Gamesley was a community garden from when people were moved to the homes there in the 1960s, but it never had a succession plan. So this is about reinvigorating a space that already mattered to the community.
So it moved. Much of the planting was lifted after Sandringham and replanted at Gamesley Community Centre, here in Glossop. Artemisia, Nepeta, Perovskia, Agapanthus, Limonium, Stipa, Echinacea, Salvia, Verbena, Geranium, Hosta and Deschampsia all made the trip.
Right plant, right place still applies, and it's the catch here. Gamesley is heavy clay with poor drainage, and a lot of these plants want full sun and well-drained soil, particularly the Perovskia, the Echinacea and the Agapanthus.
So they got a helping hand. I set them on a layer of gritty soil, mounded them up around the root ball, then mulched heavily with the sand and gravel left over from the garden. That way they don't sit in water, because those plants really dislike wet feet.
Even so, everything here is an experiment. I'm not calling it a before and after, because it's a garden that's still happening. Now it's for me and the community to tend the garden, and have the garden tend us back.
It's also the clearest example I've got of what I mean by stewardship. Designing a garden is the easy, photogenic bit. Looking after it, editing it, and seeing what it does once nobody's watching is where you actually learn anything. A show garden can be a moment. I'd like this one to be a place.
If you're in Gamesley, go and have a look. It's a community centre, so it's very much there to be used.
The Glossop Chronicle has also covered the garden. You can read the piece in the October 2026 issue, and there's more on the press page.
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