This is a FREE post for all because I think it’s an incredibly important message.
Please, please vote for The Glasshouse Garden for The People’s Choice Award. It takes a moment.
I fully planned to do my usual and share my top three gardens from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025, along with my favourite picks from the trade stands and shopping delights. That’s still coming and will be with you this weekend, but this garden, this astonishing garden, caught me by surprise. I knew it would be amazing. Come on, it’s
, Chelsea gold medal winner and all round fabulous person, but I didn’t quite expect to be so unwittingly overwhelmed with its brilliance and the emotional and humbling impact it had on me.So, today, I want wholeheartedly, to give this post up to the wonderful Herculean efforts that make Chelsea the best show on earth, and The Glasshouse Garden showcases this in spades. As far as I am concerned it is Best in Show.
You see, The glasshouse Garden isn’t any normal Chelsea garden. Yes, they are all rather gorgeous, yes they very often seem to have similar themes, particularly with the planting, gravel seems to be de rigueur this year, as are dark damson poppies and dryness, but I want more than that. I want to see a real connection with people. Trends can wait.
Enter
who doesn’t give a flying monkey’s about horticultural fashion (which is one of the reasons I love her), sticks to her guns, strong and proud, knowing in her heart of hearts that what she has lovingly created for the women of The Glasshouse is exactly what they asked for: A garden for real women to recuperate, reflect and prosper. A garden that will make them stronger and give them hope for their future through horticulture. A garden where they are safe, yet at the same time nurturing and building the confidence they need to succeed in the outside world. Because the women this garden is for have been in prison.Everyone deserves a second chance. The Glasshouse Garden is an immersive, sensory-rich garden for The Glasshouse, a pioneering social enterprise that supports women leaving prison with horticultural training, employment, and resettlement support.
With a zero percent reoffending rate (the average rate is 58%), The Glasshouse programme is breaking the cycle of re-offending, and offering women practical skills, work experience and self-belief to work toward a better future.
The garden is centred around a translucent elliptical pavilion, designed in collaboration with Hollaway Studio, that emerges from the foliage. The pavilion offers a calm, private space for women to speak with support staff, sit quietly, or connect with others outside of the standard prison environment. Its pivoting screens are made from recycled acrylic, tinted to reflect the colour palette of plants in the garden. The bespoke colour palette of deep reds and pinks with soft peach and apricot highlights were chosen by Jo to reflect the notion of “strong beauty”.
“Through the nurturing power of plants, the rewards of hard work and rediscovering one’s own value, we give women second chances, to find a better way of living for themselves, their families and society.” says Kali Hamerton-Stove, co-founder of The Glasshouse.
There’s another reason I love this garden though. Nearly all the gardens try their damndest to make their garden look like it has been there forever. Some succeed, many do not. Jo’s team are perfectionists as is she, and my god it shows. I remember seeing the raw stone, no planting, just last week on her newsletter The Gardening Mind and thinking: “how the hell is she going to pull this one off?” But, they’ve done it and in such a way, with such detail, that you would think the garden had been there for decades.
I find that kind of attention to detail almost sexy. The purposeful slant of the pavers, because that’s what pavers do when they’ve been in the ground twenty years. The utterly random self-seeding of plants in cracks and crevices, and we’re not talking about shoving in a few Erigeron here and there. No, no, this has been considered, studied to get it exactly right.
The other thing is that I was supremely nervous setting up in this garden to interview Jo, and yet, in minutes the garden itself calmed me. I’ve been in many show gardens, but this honestly felt like a real garden. The sound of the water, the fragrance of the flowers, the calmness and acceptance somehow reflected in the light shining through the elliptical pavillion, made everything ok. I felt safe. It’s a true sign that a garden is a success regardless of its medal.
More than anything though, I truly believe, particularly after meeting and speaking personally with Jo, who has become a real friend, that she actually truly cares about the project and the cause. I think it shows in every crevice, every ray of light on the translucent screens of the pavilion, every fragrant rose and trickle of water through a rill that widens to endless opportunity for strong women that deserve a second chance.
For the full plant list click here.
As always, a huge thank you to every one of you paid members. You make all of this possible. If you liked this post then please let me know by leaving a heart ♥️ and a comment if you want to. If you really want to make my day Restack it (that’s the recycle symbol below) as well. It makes a huge difference to me.
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