RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 8 – 13 July 2008

The Hampton Court Palace Flower Show offers an abundance of ideas to take home. With edible delights to help you grow your own, a host of gardening products to purchase, and fun activities for children, all the family can soak up the great outdoors and be inspired at this feast of a show.

Highlights at the show

Growing Tastes
Three distinct inspirational features about growing, and cooking an array of fruit and vegetables from the Mediterranean, Asia and Britian.

The Climate Change Dome
The Met Office has teamed up RHS Garden Wisley and will be presenting Climate Change and its effects on gardening in the future.

Thai Floating Market
The Tourism Authority of Thailand will be presenting this colourful spectacle, with an electric mix of colour and Thai produce along The Long Water.

Family Weekend
A variety of features and fun activities including the very first RHS Scarecrow Competition.

The Gardens:
Show Gardens
Water Gardens
Small Gardens
Conceptual Gardens
Inspiring Spaces

Other attractions:
Internationall Language of Flowers,
Plant Heritage Marquee,
Festival of Roses,
Floral Art Competition

Growing Your Own:
The Hampton Court Palace Flower Show will be filled to the brim with inspirational ideas for growing and cooking fruit and vegetables at home.

Growing Tastes Marquee in partnership with New Covent Garden Food Company
Come and marvel at the vibrant colours of the RHS Summer Fruit and Vegetable Competition, and try to resist the edible displays fresh from our exhibitors and experts.

Growing Tastes Kitchen Garden
Don’t miss the international cuisine being conjured up by renowned designer Michael Balston, who will be working with the team at RHS Garden Wisley to display three fruit and vegetable gardens inspired by Asian, Mediterranean and traditional British cuisine.

The best bit? We’ve garden experts on hand to show you how to grow some of these exotic ingredients in your own garden.

Growing Tastes Cookery Theatre in partnership with NS&I
Be intrigued by some exciting fragrances at our show this year. Let your nose lead you to our live demonstrations theatre, a delicious new destination where you’ll meet experts from the garden world working alongside maestros from the kitchen who really can bring the new ‘plot to plate’ thinking to life.

Chefs in the Growing Tastes Cookery Theatre will be demonstrating an array of Asian, Mediterreanean and traditional British cuisine to reflect the produce grown in the kitchen garden.

In short, you’ll find nothing less than a visual feast of mouth-watering ideas to take home with you.

Daily Mail Pavilion
Set in a wine estate in southern England, this interpretation of idyllic life in the country begins with a beautiful, rustic English vineyard.

A thatched cottage owned by the Estate Manager is surrounded by a fruit & vegetable and cutting garden, depicted by Winchester Growers. Here we see a riot of colour in improvised and informal flower beds. In contrast, Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants will create two imposing herbaceous border displays with box balls and clipped hollies, intersected by water rills, together with a conservatory display depicting Mediterranean planting. The final area of the marquee, by Cedar Nurseries, takes us to a glorious barn conversion backing onto a stately home, showing a modern interpretation of traditional living and 21st century crafts. The feeling of inside coming outdoors is experienced by the owners who cook, eat and entertain there. Nearby a donkey is housed in the owner’s stables.

The overall themes are modern living married with the old world. This wonderful feature, sponsored by the Daily Mail and the RHS, really shows us how to experience the ‘well-being factor’. An educational angle of environmental issues also sits within the spirit of the feature.