I really enjoyed seeing such a wide range of planting palettes at the Chelsea Flower Show this year, there wasn’t really one key theme, the predominantly green with splashes of white or blue and purples themes that have been seen in previous years. The key plant that seemed to get picked out was the geum, particularly orange geums with Geum ‘Prinses Juliana’ being used in several gardens, in the Homebase and Morgan Stanley gardens. The orange theme was also picked up in several other gardens with orange poppies in the Sentebale garden and a wide spectrum of oranges that really stood out against the white curves were used in Fernando Gonzalez’s garden for the Pure Land Foundation in the fresh category.

Orange flowers
© Camilla Grayley

Orange geums come in a whole range of shades, I love the series based on cocktails from the gold with deep orange red stripes of Alabama Slammer and the apricots with a splash of rosy pink of Mai Tai and Tequila Sunrise. If you enjoy Cosmopolitans there is also a geum named after this cocktail, cream with pink tinged edges.

Wild flowers
© Camilla Grayley

Several gardens included wildflowers, from cornflowers and poppies to sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum), red campion, Ranunculus from the traditional yellow Ranunculus repens to the white of Ranunculus aconitifolius ‘Flore Pleno’, foxgloves and cow parsley. Whether planted in a swathe to create a wildflower meadow or a mini wildflower meadow (a corner of the garden, a verge or an edge of a woodland or orchard) or a few wildflowers dotted through the border, a lot of which can be sown as annuals to fill in any gaps in the garden. Some cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) to add an architectural element or some cornflowers or Ranunculus sprinkled through the border to add some dots of colour. They make great cut flowers, something different from the usual varieties available in the shops and even better the insects, particularly bees love them.