Sarah Eberle won the top prize at the Chelsea Flower Show on Tuesday with a garden for the Campaign to Protect Rural England that turned overlooked countryside on urban fringes into the event’s standout display. The judging panel described the garden as “mesmerising.”
Eberle, 71, said she was “thrilled to bits” with the award. Her design was dominated by a giant, sleeping woman carved out of a fallen tree, a statue of Mother Nature surrounded by still pools, soft fronds of grass and wildflowers. The result gave the garden the feel of a dreamscape rather than a conventional show plot, and it was that atmosphere that carried it to the top prize.
The win matters because Chelsea is not just another garden show. It is the most watched stage in British horticulture, and Eberle’s victory is only the third time in the show’s 100-year history that a woman has won best in show as a solo designer. For a designer of her standing, the result also lands as a statement about who gets to define the show’s most visible work.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England said the garden was intended to show that the countryside at the edge of towns and cities is vital green space, connecting people to nature. Chris Bailes said that idea was carried by the design itself, adding that “Sarah’s garden combines elements of myth and remarkable theatre.” He said the planting created an exceptionally rare sense of atmosphere and connected the urban and the countryside. He also pointed to one of the garden’s quietest details: “Unexpected beauty is found in the concrete drain repurposed from an agricultural accessory into a mesmerising water feature using common duckweed.”
The show’s prize arrives amid renewed criticism over the lack of female representation among Chelsea’s main avenue gardens. Clare Coulson said she is “completely perplexed” each year by the shortage of female designers on the more showy central plots, noting that last year Jo Thompson’s garden was the only main avenue garden designed by a woman and that this year, of nine main avenue show gardens, there are two female designers. She added that even a garden designed to foreground specifically female cancers is designed by a man.
That reference is to Silent No More, a garden designed by Darren Hawkes to open up uninhibited conversations about gynaecological health. Elizabeth Tyler said the reaction inside the studio was one of disbelief when the team realised that the garden for a specifically women’s cancer charity was being designed by a man. Sam Proctor, meanwhile, said colleagues with children were heavily reliant on family support to cope with Chelsea’s build and the periods when lead designers have to go above and beyond. Eberle’s prize is a personal triumph, but it also lands in the middle of a familiar argument that Chelsea has still not answered: who gets the most visible space, and why.
