RHS Chelsea: A place to grow

Howden directors Julie Webb and Lisa Smith have spent much of their career mentoring and helping people realise their full potential. Behind the scenes of The Glasshouse Garden at RHS Chelsea they witnessed how feminine strength, second chances and the healing power of nature combined to create a gold medal-winning show garden – and give women real hope to rebuild their lives.

There was only woman designer in the 2025 RHS Chelsea ‘large show garden’ category and Jo Thompson’s garden stood out a mile from the rest because it was filled with roses that perfumed the warm air.

The gold-medal winning The Glasshouse Garden oozed beauty, not only in the rich planting but its back story of a pioneering social enterprise supporting women leaving prison.

Every single inch of the show garden was built to a brief based on designer Jo Thompson’s visits to meet inmates from women’s prison HMP Sutton Park, in Kent, who work in horticulture through The Glasshouse Botanics programme which supplies plants to London offices.

“I work in horticulture every day for The Glasshouse. My hands are either in soil or we’re installing plants for big corporate companies.

“I'm now released, so I have a job like anyone else. I have been out of prison for more than a year. I was acutely aware everything was taken away from me so to have it back I see it through different eyes, I smell through a different nose, I hear through different ears.

“Now this is my journey, this is my life and it's real, and it's life changing. The focus now is about going forward and this garden proves that we are growing.”

Ri added: “Running water in the rill, which leads to a small pool, represents the journey forward. In custody you don't have free access to water, you can press a button but you only have limited pushes. To have the water was beautiful but also the natural noise as it flows is very special.

“Life moves on but visitors looking in on this garden won't understand all of the story. I met Jo when she was coming up with ideas for the garden and I was part of the group that went to tell our story to supporter Project Giving Back*. They've made such a difference.

“Maybe the perception is that when a woman is released from prison it is a glorious day but it is actually scary. It is hard to get a job with a criminal record but with skills we have women working in garden centres, working on roads and roundabouts – they have the building blocks and they can choose to fly.

“If you can have a small bag of skills and tools and opportunities, that’s all we want, we can be productive members of society again. I did not know if I had a future because once you lose things you do not know if you are going to get the back. Knowing I have a future I recognise I have a wealth of transferable skills and I know I have been given an opportunity. I have grabbed it with two muddy hands. I know I have a future now.”

Jo said: “For me to work with the women and to put into reality their hopes and their aspirations was so important.

“One of the women said she had picked up a feather that she found in the exercise yard and put it in her diary because that was the only link with nature that she had. And I was thinking that's so sad, just looking through your prison window, through metal slats and seeing a brick wall on the other side. It's not nourishing.

“But when the women first came into the show garden they said, ‘oh you've listened to us, you've included the things that we wanted’.

“I said ‘well of course I listened to you, because you're the client’ but they were not used to being listened to.

“This garden is not just about beauty, it’s about legacy. It’s about hope and real change for women rebuilding their lives.”

Coming from a dark place

There are 12 women's prisons in the UK and The Glasshouse, based in Cranbrook, Kent, works mainly with HMP East Sutton Park, near Maidstone. It is an open prison, one of only two in the UK, and Jo Thompson spent many hours talking to the women about what their experience in prison, how they feel about their work in horticulture and what they hope for the future.

Kali Hammerton-Stoves, founder and director of The Glasshouse Botanics says ‘some 90 per cent of the women at The Glasshouse have been either victims of crime or in situations with abuse or coercion and they are coming in from a place of chaos, a really dark place’

She said: “We work with women in the last year or two of their sentence in prison. We look at the individual and see what they're capable of. They are mainly in open prison, so they will have passed a lot of tests and shown very good behaviour for a long period of time to make it to that point.

“We hire them on day release, they come out to us and we pay them a living wage to train in horticulture. They learn in our growing facility about how to nurture and grow plants and as part of our workforce they go up our mainly corporate clients such as The Francis Crick Institute, Pearson, The Conduit and the Better Society Capital where we put plants in those offices and our women maintain them.”

Visit theglasshouse.co.uk

*Project Giving Back was set up to give charitable organisations in the UK the chance to exhibit a show garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, to promote their cause while supporting the horticultural industry.

Garden Insurance: Protecting your plants, tress and outdoor structures

For many of us, our garden is our sanctuary, yet it’s a safe guess that you might not have considered the need for insurance to protect your garden. Gardens have become integral to our lifestyle, with many transforming their gardens into outside galleries for art and sculpture, or a blank canvas for innovative hard landscaping and imaginative planting designs.

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