12-07-2025
HOW LOVING FLOWERS CAN SAVE THE PLANET
Sonia Sedivy is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the graduate department of philosophy. She is the author of Beauty and the End of Art.
I knew, before my first visit to the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, that it was the premier gardening event in the world. Even still, I could not have imagined its scale – and I continue to be overwhelmed on each visit.
For one week every May, the enormous 23-acre grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea are transformed with 16 show gardens, four all-about-plants gardens, 10 balcony and container gardens, houseplant studios, floral displays, vendors, and a 2.9-acre Great Pavilion containing about 400 exhibits by expert growers and floral designers. With medals awarded in all these categories, Chelsea is an Olympics of gardening, complete with daily BBC coverage that culminates in an hour of detailed analysis in the evenings.
The intense crowds – about 160,000 visitors every year – are also part of the fun. In a nod to the aristocratic history of British garden design, people enjoy stands offering Pimm's, Champagne and, of course, scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam; women sport flowery dresses that can make your eyes swim from the thousands of patterns milling about.
I was thrilled by the sense-expanding colour combinations of the plants, including a blend of deep burgundy giant poppies with pale yellow wildflowers I will never forget. I was struck by novel designs that address current ecological problems, from an urban garden equipped with talking smart sensors to a revival of Britain's lost rainforests. Inside the Great Pavilion, it was hard to believe my own eyes at the size and perfection of the flowers: hundreds of varieties of each type, such as clematis, delphinium or amaryllis.
Yet all this might strike you as a little frivolous – like a superficial distraction from the hardness of the world. Flowers are nice, of course, but focusing on beauty can seem like a frill amid the crises of our times, from war to a warming planet.
But if a thing of beauty is a joy forever – as Keats wrote in his poem Endymion – the stunning Chelsea Flower Show is proof that beauty can be of the moment and practical, too, changing with our evolving needs and concerns. Each garden, exhibit or plant at Chelsea implements important environmental functions with a new, gorgeous naturalism that delivers the powerful message at the heart of the show: even with just a container or two, we all have the ability to make incremental, much-needed contributions to help mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. That idea has clearly taken root in Britain – that beauty isn't necessarily a frill or a distraction, but actually a driver of change – and it should be allowed to bloom here in Canada, too.
Many of our current beliefs and attitudes about beauty as an indulgence are shaped by debates from the beginnings of Western aesthetics in the 18th century. The rise of the arts in the West at that time was accompanied by the birth of philosophical aesthetics, which aimed to explain the nature and experience of beautiful art. Yet focusing on the arts when we think about beauty has had unfortunate consequences.
Unlike cups or buildings or bridges, paintings or sculptures or pieces of music don't have practical functions – and so, over time, we in the West came to think of the functional and the beautiful as being distinct. It seemed that things could carry out their functions just as well without being beautiful, and so, beauty came to be viewed as little more than a bonus.
It is undeniable that beauty is a powerful draw; no one doubts its seductive power. But often, we assume that in hard circumstances – when there's not enough time, budgets are tight or the world feels like it's on fire – we can set beauty aside to carry on with what really needs to get done. Though this view underlies many of our ordinary attitudes toward beauty, we should reconsider it. After all, there is no question that beauty plays an integral role in the ways people live.
A few thinkers have tried to convince us of this. For example, the late 19th-century designer and social activist William Morris used beautiful design to counter the tide of mass production that he believed denuded everyday life of beauty. In the early 20th century, American philosopher John Dewey argued that ordinary perception is fulfilled – taken to its full potential – in aesthetic experiences that can be prompted by ordinary things in everyday life.
By the late 20th century, several contemporary philosophers followed Dewey to argue that not only the arts, but also the environment and the commonplace, can be repositories of beauty or aesthetic value.
I believe this is important, because beauty is not simply a feature of things that brings pleasure, but a distinct value that shapes and enriches human life.
Our day-to-day lives can hold aesthetic value in many different ways: in ordinary objects or clothing, in everyday rituals or events, in our actions in sports or dance. And now, technology has made the arts and their aesthetic features a large part of everyday life: We plug ourselves into music, binge hours of narrative arts and enjoy the ubiquity of images vying for our attention at all times. There is no question that our aesthetic experiences – and experiences of beauty, if we are lucky – and the things they engage with are an enormous part of human life.
This brings us back to gardens, which have united beauty with function as a core part of human life since ancient times. Indigenous medicine wheel gardens and kitchen gardens lay out medicinal plants, edibles and flowers in formal designs. English cottage gardens informally mix flowers and edibles in dense profusion. In hot climates, walled courtyard gardens around a central water feature provide cool respite.
But now, with the climate emergency, gardens have a new and important responsibility: helping local ecosystems sustain their functioning and biodiversity while also helping them be resilient to the stresses of climate change. Community organizations and commercial nurseries have joined in this mission, attempting to share ecological gardening practices and information about which plants are native or pollinator-friendly and how to replace pesticide use.
But Chelsea does what no amount of verbal information can: We experience gardens that are beautiful and ecological in every respect. In their beauty, the gardens inspire us to change by offering concrete takeaways about the latest ideas and techniques. They teach us without making us feel like we are being taught.
Recent show gardens focus on innovative solutions for supporting local insect populations, especially pollinators, and for withstanding the droughts and torrential downpours that come with a changing, warming climate, without putting more strain on public water supply. Each show garden now includes a water feature such as a reservoir for storing rainwater and dispersing it in small ponds and rills that foster wildlife as well as plants.
Last year, Tom Massey and Je Ahn's shady, tree-filled WaterAid Garden integrated a large sculptural rainwater-harvesting pavilion that catches water with its green-roof, stores it and purifies it, and then releases it as needed.
This year, the Killik and Co. 'Save For A Rainy Day Garden' by Baz Grainger set an open, airy family garden around an architectural rainscaping structure that serves as a pergola while harvesting and distributing water through channels amidst Mediterranean plants that can withstand drought.
These innovations and techniques are wonderful, but like so many visitors at Chelsea, what took my breath away was the distinctive beauty of the gardens' naturalistic planting style. Gone is the carefully curated look of distinct flower groups that's so common here in Canada as elsewhere. Instead, I saw natural tapestries where flowers interweaved as they do in nature, in meadows or along woodlands, but imbued with new colour and plant combinations from the artistry and skill of the designers and planting teams. Grasses mingle among plants of varying heights with differently shaped and shaded leaves and flowers. The effect is both complex and airy, multitextured and multicoloured, each plant making a distinct contribution that both sets off its neighbours and is set off by them: the long next to the short, the slender next to the rounded.
Though the new style affirms the natural growth patterns of flowers, it uses the full bounty of cultivated flowers as well as wildflowers. The takeaway is that we don't need to choose between native and cultivated varieties: They can be woven together to support a wide assortment of wildlife.
At Chelsea, each garden – highlighting different ecosystems such as shaded woodlands, parched rocky fields, coastal sand dunes and even urban brownfields – is awarded based on how they implement ecological functions both creatively and beautifully. Last year, the Muscular Dystrophy UK – Forest Bathing Garden designed by Ula Maria used two conceptual elements – an organic stone wall reminiscent of the structure of cells and a traditional garden wall made of discarded building materials – to frame a birch grove planted with flowers that thrive in dappled semi-shade. Most memorably, single white foxgloves rose amid white birch trunks at the back of the garden.
Ann-Marie Powell and the Blue Diamond Team's garden celebrated Octavia Hill, the social reformer and founder of the National Trust, by promoting urban biodiversity with bright warm apricot and orange coloured flowers that can thrive in a brownfield along with edibles for urban wildlife.
This year, the Hospitalfield Arts Garden designed by Nigel Dunnett reimagined the undulating look of blooming sand dunes to highlight the resiliency of this habitat and demonstrate the ecological benefits of planting within even a small layer of sand or gravel. Such coastal beauty is soft yet tough, with the characteristic pale or greyish green tones of heat-tolerant plants.
And the dog-friendly garden designed by leading British gardener and BBC presenter Monty Don demonstrated how ordinary practicality can be united with enormous ecological benefit. Though the garden was ringed with breathtaking tapestries of backyard flowers, its centrepiece was, quite literally, a shaggy, unkempt-seeming lawn which many Canadians would feel an impulse to conquer, even if they have to pay a company to make it pristine. A no-fuss 'shaggy lawn' is shot through with various other plants (a.k.a. weeds) and it is definitely not mowed within an inch of its life, which means that it is not sterile to living things, but a living part of the rest of your garden, supporting insects and pollinators. Crucially, such lawns look alive and happy – unlike their manicured cousins.
It is hard to convey the excitement and joy I saw at Chelsea, with beautiful planting bringing ecological strategies to life. The gardens function sustainably with a new naturalistic beauty that emerges at this moment of urgent need while celebrating our love of plants. What we see in these gardens is a fusion of the natural and human-made in an attitude of respect. It is their beauty that drives us to make these new practices our own.
And so, like just about everyone at the Chelsea Flower Show, I could hardly wait to bring this beauty home: to put together a new pot for butterflies, to add some native Ontario flowers for our pollinators, and to try a bit of naturalistic planting in my small garden here in Toronto. Now each little change and new beauty, each butterfly and native bee I glimpse, add small – and important – moments of joy.
