Rachel de Thame is back on screen in 2026 as part of the ’s presenting team for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, joining Monty Don and Sophie Raworth for the annual garden showcase. For viewers who have followed her from modelling and acting into horticulture, the return puts one of the programme’s most recognisable faces back in front of the cameras at one of the biggest dates in the gardening calendar.
Her path to that point was anything but direct. Raised near North London, de Thame studied ballet at the Royal Ballet School, contracted glandular fever at age 15 and gave up her dream of a dancing career at 19. She later studied drama and History of Art and worked at an art dealers in London before being recruited by a modelling agency while pregnant with her first baby. By 1998 she had appeared in the mini-series Merlin and the British feature film Bodywork.
It was only in the late 1990s that she pivoted fully to the subject that would define the rest of her career. De Thame enrolled at the English Gardening School and went on to become known in horticulture through presenting roles on programmes such as Gardeners' World. Her return to the ’s Chelsea coverage gives the show a familiar presence as it brings together gardeners, broadcasters and the floral spectacle that draws attention every year.
That familiarity also matters because de Thame’s career has been shaped by interruptions and resets. She married Stephen Colover in 1986, had two children, Lauren and Joe, with him and divorced in the early 1990s. She later married Gerard de Thame, and they had two daughters, Emma and Olivia. Her daughter Lauren became a talented illustrator and later joined forces with her mother to provide drawings for the book A Flower Garden for Pollinators, a reminder that gardening has remained a family thread as well as a professional one.
De Thame’s return carries added weight because of what happened in 2018, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her cancer was caught early, but she still took a leave of absence from Gardeners' World while she underwent treatment. She said at the time: “While one is grateful to have options, treatment is no walk in the park.” She added that she found “compensations” in the experience, including “a renewed, almost desperate desire to get on with some of the things that for too long have lingered on a mental to-do list,” and said: “When you’ve felt rocked to your foundations, the only sensible thing is to get on with living.”
What comes next is straightforward and public: de Thame will again be part of the ’s Chelsea Flower Show presenting line-up in 2026, alongside Don and Raworth. For a broadcaster who built her reputation after leaving modelling and acting behind, the booking answers its own question. She is not returning as a nostalgia act. She is back because gardening is still her centre of gravity, and the Chelsea stage is still one of the places where that matters most.
