Chelsea Flower Show Pavilion 2023

A Main Avenue Show Garden at The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023, The Royal Entomological Society Garden was supported by Project Giving Back and was awarded an RHS Silver-Gilt Medal.

Designed to inspire and ignite an interest in insects and insect science, and highlight the essential purpose they serve in the health and future of our environments. It aimed to impress upon the public the important role we play and how our choices affect insects, through the plants we cultivate, the habitats we create and preserve, and the time and interest we put into researching and protecting them.

Insects are vital to global ecosystems, but are sometimes overlooked in comparison to larger and more visible birds and mammals. Within the insect kingdom, bees and butterflies usually steal the limelight, but moths, beetles, hornets, ants amongst countless other insect species are just as important.

The RES garden was inspired by the unexpected beauty and biodiversity found on British brownfield sites. These previously human inhabited spaces are full of biodiversity, housing an array of plant species and wildlife. With over 80% of the UK population now living in urban areas, brownfield sites must be considered as important for biodiversity as rural sites. The RES garden demonstrated how to create a range of habitats for insects, utilising often discarded materials such as deadwood sculptures, rammed earth floors and walls, mixed construction waste mulches and piles of rubble, sand and gabions filled with waste materials.

The centrepiece of the garden is a teaching lab for showing the insects to visitors. This is modelled on an compound eye, and was designed based on the Spaceplates system by Anne Romme, N55 and Anne Bagger. The system relies on flat hexagonal facetted panels that create nominal nodes that can be shown to behave like a true dome. This results in a 7m diameter dome with a structural thickness of 3mm that can resist buckling induced by wind loads at its final location in Stratford, East London. The engineering work was based on research by Anne Bagger and performs similarly to nodal domes created by Buckminster Fuller and others.

The windows are formed from polycarbonate covered in a dichroic film that creates an iridescent effect similar to insect eyes.

The show garden is being relocated to IQL Stratford, at the gateway to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where it will provide a permanent resource for RES to host events, educate and inspire.

Funding: Project Giving Back
Garden Design: Tom Massey Studio
Garden Construction: Landscape Associates
Plants: Hortus Loci
Lab concept: Anne Romme, Anne Bagger and N55
Structural Engineering: Cake Engineering
Fabrication and installation: Cake Industries
Geometry definition: Mule Studio
Photographs: Alister Thorpe