Inside the The Anneka Rice Colour Cutting Garden

The Anneka Rice Colour Cutting Garden is designed by gardener, cook, writer and nursery woman Sarah Raven. The Garden is one of the ‘BBC Radio 2 Feel Good Gardens’ at the 2017 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, sponsored by M&G Investments.

Sarah has enlisted the help of one of the UK’s best known interior designers, Tricia Guild, OBE, as they share a passion for colour and Tricia is renowned for the use of colours in her designs.

Every square inch of space in this garden will give you flowers, flowers and more flowers. It is a profusion of colour and will be an amazing sight, concentrating on plants that cut and come out again. Gold, the colour for 50th Wedding Anniversaries, features in this garden to celebrate 50 years of Radio 2.

As well as buckets full of freshly cut flowers and a huge dill and sweet pea globe hanging from a hazel and willow arch, there are wooden structures made with coppiced products – hazel, silver birch, chestnut and willow – for staking and support for frames on which climbers grow.

All the plants have been selected after trials at Sarah’s garden Perch Hill in Sussex to give the greatest number of stems per metre and the most beautiful and easiest plants to grow. Sarah has concentrated on the many wonderful plants that flower from late spring, through to the summer and onto autumn, which are nectar-rich and with single and simple flower forms to feed and encourage pollinators.

Both Anneka Rice and Tricia Guild will join Sarah in the build up to the show to help with planting.