The Royal Horticultural Society's Great Spring Show has filled the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea each May since 1912, its gardens built to be judged and then dismantled.
The Royal Horticultural Society’s show at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, held there every May since 1912, returns to Chelsea from Tuesday 18 to Saturday 22 May 2027.
It is still formally the Great Spring Show, and its grounds are the old soldiers’ garden beside the river. By the 1970s crowding was so severe that the Society opened the gates at 08:00. In 1988 it capped attendance at 40,000 a day, a reduction of 90,000 across the week.
The gardens are built for the week and then taken down. A designer spends a year and a considerable budget raising a mature garden on flat ground in three weeks. After the judging several hundred thousand people file past, and then the garden is dismantled and the plants sold.
The Floral Marquee at the centre works the other way, with nurseries showing what they have spent decades breeding.
The medals are awarded on the Tuesday morning and decide which gardens the rest of the week talks about. Members of the Royal Family attend, as they have almost every year since the show arrived.