Matt Keightley is bringing artificial intelligence to the Chelsea Flower Show next week, using software to help design his garden as he launches a new app that he says can do for outdoor spaces what digital tools have already done for the rest of the home. The award-winning designer, who has created gardens for figures including Prince Harry, is behind Spacelift, a platform that can reportedly replicate the work of garden designers and create spaces from scratch.
The move lands at the Royal Hospital gardens in Chelsea, London, where the Chelsea Flower Show opens next week and where the debate over AI in design is now moving from theory to the main stage. Spacelift will exhibit three full-sized gardens at the show, all designed entirely through the platform: a rural-inspired scheme using reclaimed materials, a compact urban balcony garden and a woodland-themed wellbeing space with a sauna and cold shower. Keightley said, “We’re used to using technology to design every part of our homes – except our gardens. Spacelift changes that. It gives people a starting point, a plan, and the confidence to actually create something – not just imagine it.”
The show is not just a launch pad for a new product. It is also the place where garden design is treated as an art form, and that is why the response has been so sharp. Andrew Duff, a designer and chairman of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea judges, said successful garden design is “an art form” rooted in creativity, collaboration, experience and human connection. He added that technology may offer useful tools, but it cannot match the insight, empathy and personal engagement that come from working with a skilled garden designer to create a living, evolving natural space within the home. Yvonne Price, a long-time Chelsea supporter, was blunter: “That it’s being shown at Chelsea – which is the world-leading show for garden design – feels like a betrayal.”
There is also a more practical argument running alongside the emotional one. Alexandra Davison said the platform is aimed at “the vast majority of UK homeowners” who are priced out of professional garden design altogether, and that it expands the market rather than competing with designers. The pitch reflects a real shift in how gardens are already being planned. Some existing tools use AI to send watering reminders or map which flower species might suit a changing climate, but Keightley is taking the technology further by putting it at the centre of the design process itself. Tom Massey, who has worked with AI before, said he used it at last year’s Chelsea to help track data from a garden where visitors could listen to urban trees, with sensors monitoring growth, sap flow, soil conditions, air quality and weather patterns. But he said he has never used AI to design a garden, adding that he does not think people want robot designers doing surveys or creating schemes from scratch. Nadine Mansfield captured the anxiety in one line when she asked, “What time does the job centre open?”
That is the argument Chelsea is now hosting in public. The show has long sold itself as the standard-bearer for garden design, and next week it will also become a test of whether AI can be presented not as a threat to the craft, but as a new way into it. Keightley is betting that the industry can absorb the shock. His critics clearly do not agree.
