THE THRILL of the show

Bright sunshine welcomed visitors to the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, adding to the thrill of exploring the world’s biggest annual garden show. KG regular Stephanie Hafferty brings you the veggie highlights

- Stephanie Hafferty

In 2021, I spent almost a month at Hampton Court Palace, when I designed the RHS No Dig Allotment Demonstration Garden together with Charles Dowding (KG August 2021). What a fantastic experience! This year I was delighted to have been invited to speak at the Market Theatre, opposite the River Cottage Garden, giving talks about no-dig gardening and growing your own food and, most importantly, exploring this vibrant show.

It’s exciting to explore RHS shows before they are officially open to the public as final touches are made to the show gardens, plants watered so they look in the peak of health and the air of anticipation increases.

Press photographers, who will have arrived hours before to capture the gardens in the early morning light, set up incredibly complicated-looking equipment alongside camera crews filming famous TV presenters for the BBC.

As a keen grow-your-own enthusiast, I headed straight for the River Cottage Market Garden, one of the key RHS Feature Gardens. Designed by head gardener Adam Crofts, this impressive walk-through garden was based on the productive market garden at River Cottage HQ in the Axe Valley in Devon.

My eye was immediately drawn to a curious thatched roof structure on three wooden legs, underplanted with a range of pollinator plants: a ‘rocket hive’. Designed by Matt Somerville, and used across River Cottage, these ‘bee kind’ freedom hives mimic the natural habitat of bees and offer a safe, well-insulated space for these crucial pollinators to thrive. Practical, sustainable and charming.