Let's garden together!
There's great news for community gardening from the RHS
The RHS is probably best known for its world-famous flower shows – RHS Chelsea Flower Show being one of them.
They draw people to visit from all over the world, and during the week of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, BBC2 has provided daily coverage. (You can see these programmes on BBC iPlayer if you have access to it.)
Out of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show (this May 2026), came the great news that funding for local groups will get a HUGE boost! The RHS is going to invest £3.8 million of lottery funding into community gardening. The horticultural society will work with both Social Farms and Gardens, a UK wide charity supporting communities to farm, garden and grow together, and Hubbub who make sustainability second nature.
In 2025, the RHS undertook a survey and discovered that 14.7 million people wanted to get involved in community gardening. But over half of the community gardening groups were worried about their future – many were surviving on just £500 a year.
More support for local groups
The funding comes from the National Lottery Community Fund’s climate action fund. It will support the expansion of 20,000 existing community gardens, helping to secure land for growing in areas with limited access to green spaces.
The start of an online platform for community gardening!
Not only that, the RHS lottery funding will be used to begin an online platform for community gardening. It will offer advice on gardening, sustainability and act as a hub for groups to share their stories. It will also set up mentoring programmes. And it will start in 2028.
Gardening is great for connecting with people. It gives them something in common to talk about, be it admiring the efforts of other people, admitting our own growing failures (and yes, I have plenty), sharing a love of beautiful places and developing friendships. And for feeling pride in what you’ve all achieved and recognising you’ve played a part in it. You can be a part of something.
And if you can’t wait to get involved, please visit the RHS website and take a look at their Get Involved section. It has lots of ways you can get involved now, such as Wild About Gardens, National Gardening Week, Britain in Bloom, It's Your Neighbourhood and the Campaign for School Gardening. You can also volunteer and become a member and get involved in a local gardening group.
There is an incredible amount of work being done in the community already – so let’s help it grow and spread! This new funding boost will hopefully really power community gardening to a new level and the more people can connect to the outside world, the better.
Congratulations to Sarah Eberle!
And congratulations to Sarah Eberle, who won the RHS Chelsea Garden of the Year for The Campaign to Protect Rural England: ‘On the Edge’. Her garden depicts the countryside at the edge of towns and cities and the crucial green spaces which connect people to nature. Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) explained that the garden “On the edge” celebrates the “edgelands” as they call them and they wanted the garden to give a clear message that every town and city should be surrounded by protected countryside for nature, for climate and for our wellbeing.
CPRE have a petition, Stand up for the countryside near you.
By the way, the new RHS Sandringham Flower Show in Norfolk is set to feature a garden to celebrate frogs, tadpoles and amphibian life! The garden will be called the RHS Pollywiggle Garden! Find out about it here.
The fabulous photo at the top of this blog is by Matt Seymour at Unsplash!
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