City dwellers will be invited to experience the cutting-edge techniques of urban gardening at the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) Urban Garden Show (Westminster, 27-28 October)
Featuring ideas for transforming even the smallest urban corners, the event will reveal some of the more unusual ways to get greenery into city spaces and bring the best of the outdoors in for autumn.
Peckham’s popular Green Rooms Botanical Market will be relocating to Westminster, bringing with it an eclectic mix of products from some of London’s top independent botanical businesses. Plant enthusiasts of all levels will be able to explore the urban jungle and stock up on tropical houseplants, pots, terrariums, cacti, macramé and botanical prints and more.
For those looking for the next indoor gardening trend, ‘aquascaping’ expert George Farmer will display this unusual, emerging form of underwater gardening and will be running workshops to inspire visitors to try their hand at creating their own submerged miniature landscapes using aquatic plants.
Just in time for Halloween, multi-sensory design agency Bompas and Parr will be creating the ‘Garden of Darkness’, a nocturnal installation to celebrate moths, the unsung heroes of pollination. Guests will be plunged into darkness as they walk through a dark haze of night-blooming plants and attendant moths, with night-vision goggles to guide them through the space.
Creative talks and workshops to help everyone get to grips with urban gardening will run throughout the show. Gardeners’ Question Time panellist Anne Swithinbank will demonstrate houseplant care; Alys Fowler will focus on growing in small areas; Rob Dwiar will take a look at landscape design in computer games alongside PlayStation 4 game demonstrations.
Workshops will include terrarium building with London Terrariums and landscape arrangement inspired by the Japanese art of flower arranging Ikebana with La Famille. Meanwhile, Bonsai Kai will be running Bonsai training demonstrations and visitors can learn how to sow their own avocado seeds with Joseph Ford.
Tickets can be booked online via the RHS website here
