Who will rescue Britain’s gardens? Robots soil our suburban dreams

Like the blooming of wisteria, it is the brevity and intensity that makes the Chelsea Flower Show the most compelling, and revealing, horticultural show on earth. Amid the welter of statistics — the 400 horticultural exhibits; the 8,000 staff members; the near million plants; the 41,218 glasses of Pimms — the most remarkable fact is this: this year, just like every other, around 30 new plants will be launched here. As ever, Chelsea has at its root the uniquely British eagerness to master nature, through husbandry but also through technology. Yet what makes this year’s show interesting is that it indicates how, amid the digital revolution, horticulture may become increasingly unavailable to the masses.

Gardening in Britain is big business. In 2023, UK households spent around £13.2 billion on garden goods, and another £5.8 billion on gardening and landscaping services. As the sector’s premier meetup, the Chelsea Flower Show is therefore an ideal opportunity to reflect on the latest trends. We will see a lot of hardy Mediterranean plants amid rammed earth brick work this year, and plenty of sustainability gubbins too. Rainwater harvesting will become a celebrated feature, replacing the battered plastic tubs under gutters.

Yet there will also be deeper developments: evidence of the ever-evolving relationship between man, technology and nature. That’s clear enough in the form of the Avanade Intelligent Garden, a particularly British expression of a wider global trend. Avanade, the sponsor, is a Microsoft-owned consultancy hawking their AI and business analytics skills, and its show garden will explore how monitoring soil moisture, pH, temperature, air quality, wind, and rainfall can help gardeners. With all those buzzwords floating about, it’s tempting to be cynical. But Je Ahn, principle of architecture practice Studio Weave, who designed the project with the gardener Tom Massey, insists the garden isn’t just a gimmick. As he says, 30% of trees planted in cities die within a year, and 50% within a decade. By monitoring their needs and their performance, we can ensure they survive.

We should remember, here, that British gardens are very often laboratories. We have a rich history of applying technology to gardening in a way that has fundamentally determined the direction of social change. This is true in an age of mass migration and with a housing crisis as it was in times of yore. It may have been Louis XIV that built the “Machine de Marly” on the Seine — to supply the fountains of Versailles, itself the greatest piece of technology before the Industrial Revolution — but it would be the great estate gardens of Britain that actually fired modernity.

Consider, for instance, a technique like “puddling” — the compacting of clay to form an impermeable layer. It was vital in the building of our canal network, in the 18th and 19th centuries, but was ultimately borrowed from the “canals” and ornamental lakes of country gardens. Another good example is the orangery designed by Joseph Bramah for Windsor Castle in the early 19th century, and perhaps the first hot-water central heating system ever made. Joseph Paxton’s vast 1840 greenhouse, the Great Stove at Chatsworth, used hot-water heating: conducted from eight underground coal-fired boilers, all through a seven-mile maze of six-inch pipes. Steam engines were used in gardens years before their use in the manufacturing industry for pumping purposes. British gardens have always been busy.

Nor is it simply that gardens were testbeds for industrial development. When we look at the glass and steel structures that dominate our cities, we are looking at the end point of a technique first used for plants. The greenhouses of the 18th century first deployed uniform systems of glass panels and metal mullions — iron as opposed to its successor steel — to maximise light. The Hackney camellia house for the nurseryman Conrad Loddiges, completed in 1819, was one of the first to use standardised curved wrought-iron sash bars to hold curvilinear glass, all linked together and supported on cast-iron columns.

Yet technology also helped popularise gardening among the masses — and not just the greenhouses we inherited from those grand country houses. Until the Fifties, explains Fiona Davison of the Royal Horticultural Society, seeding plants required reserves of skill and patience. Plants were given as cuttings, shared between families and friends, severely limiting the range and possibilities of gardening. To do anything more adventurous, you would need a potting shed, heated somehow, to grow plants from seeds which you would buy blind from specialist importers, often by mail-order. It was a serious, almost agricultural, activity, for dedicated hobbyists, rather than part-timers.

But then, after the Second World War, came the popularisation of plastic, meaning seeded plants could now be bought in cheap pots from new stores called garden centres; places of spectacular colour and exotic choice, cribbed from the USA. Another important innovation was the television. Gardeners World premiered in 1968, six months after colour was introduced to British TVs. For the first time, that allowed enthusiasts to convey the vibrancy of horticulture to millions of people in the comfort of their own homes. All that helped put gardening within reach of the wealthier working classes, especially as the suburbanisation boom of earlier decades meant that around 70% of all Britons now owned land, up from just 5% in the 1870s.

Now, though, these dynamics are shifting. Though the portion of our housing stock that has gardens has been stable for many years, that could soon change as the housing crisis demands that ministers are under ever-more pressure to build more flats. In practice, that could soon mean that gardening increasingly becomes a middle-class pursuit. And though Labour has promised new urban apartments will have mandated green spaces, the Avanade example suggests these places are likely to be cared for by technology rather than serried ranks of gardeners.

If you don’t believe me, just visit the Bosco Verticale in Milan. Designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri, his project started as a single plant-clad high rise in the Italian city. Now, though, Boeri’s vision is being applied as far afield as Cairo and Nanjing. He explains that the plants themselves must be nurtured by a central control panel rather than neglectful humans. Planners and architects definitely want to green our ever-denser cities. But what we are beginning to see are plans for a technologically managed layering rather than the messy process of bringing together dirt and water and plantings to make life and colour.

Just as urban roads and social spaces are destined to become more regulated through technology, so will our relationship with nature. Not that the British suburban garden is destined to be subsumed by machines. That’s clear enough at the Chelsea Flower Show. The show garden of the great Japanese designer, Kazuyuki Ishihara, shows how British tastes are invigorated again and again by the exotic, with irises strewn among the maples.

Britain’s suburban gardens endure, from the thin tithes behind Victorian terraces, through the neo-Elizabethan patches of the garden cities, to the overlooked patch of the modern estate, invigorated by tips from Garden Rescue or Real Gardens. They’re all different, of course, but together evoke an older kind of gardening. For planners and politicians pondering how to hit housing targets, they’re also a reminder that what makes suburban living attractive is the imminence of the natural, the opportunity not just to watch plants passively, but to get our hands dirty and help them bloom.

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Tim Abrahams writes about architecture and is host of the podcast Superurbanism.

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