The Judge’s Tale - RHS Chelsea Flower Show Week

- This article has been unlocked for everyone to read after its author James Alexander-Sinclair won Digital Writer of the Year at the Garden Media Guild awards 2025. Want to hear more from The Garden Collective? Subscribe now.

It is Monday 19th May. This weekend has been busy because, for the eighteenth time in a row I have been judging gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and you find me in possession of a secret.

Nothing that will affect national security, no honourable members caught untrousered in unfortunate circumstances nor can I give you a dead cert winner for the Derby, but still, within horticultural circles, quite an onerous secret.

For I am one of the few people who know everything: I know who has won best in show; which ones have sparkled and which ones have not quite made the grade. I know the names, the stories and all the dirt - although not as much as you might hope for. All through today, people will sidle up to me and my fellow judges and try to charm that information from me, and I will remain stony faced and schtum, for today is press day. There will be journalists' lunches, junkets, chat, photo calls, scattered celebrities ranging in grade from A) - dames, Strictly winners and film stars - to Z) - reality television people of whom I have not heard, tech billionaires and politicians. Later in the afternoon there will be royal visits and all day, there will be an awful lot of hugging.

Sssshhhh...

In the beginning

The perambulation to this moment started nearly a year ago. Last June I sat on a selection panel - five judges who went through all the Show Garden applications with a very fine toothed  comb. We looked at plans, visuals, construction details, budgets, plantlists and every aspect of exhibiting a garden at the greatest flower show on earth. We have conversations with the designers and ask a lot of impertinent questions. There were three of these meetings over three months, and we do our best to help as many gardens as possible across the line.

Fast forward to last Friday when the landscaping and planting teams are finishing off and I, and my fellow judges, roll into town like the Kelly Gang in our hi-viz vests and loaded criteria. The judges (some well known to the public, others less so) are a mixture of designers, landscapers, plants people and generalists (artists, writers and others who bring a different slant to the party). Their names are published in the Show Guide. There are three judging panels operating at RHS Chelsea this year - Balcony and Container gardens, large Show Gardens and small Show Gardens. All of us operate according to the same rules.

Judging is, basically, in two parts - assessment on Saturday and judging on Sunday. The assessors (three of them) go and give all the gardens a first look, they talk to the designers (in case anything has changed) and run through the nine criteria for the first time.

Criteria hysteria

These criteria (if you are listening to this there is a copy on the written version of this article) cover all the important aspects of designing a show garden. To paraphrase it runs like this…

The brief (has the team done what they said they would do), the showmanship (is the garden exciting? Will it draw admiring gasps from the public?), are the materials well chosen? How about the design? in both two and three dimensions (do the paths work? Are the trees in scale with the buildings? are the proportions balanced?) has it been built beautifully? (looking at craftsmanship and all the tiny details that a good landscaper will have considered). Last, but definitely not least, we look at plants. The planting design, horticultural correctness and how skilfully the planting has been put together (plants not too crowded and not too far apart - a tricky balance to strike!) I have attached a rough judging diagram to the text version of this piece so you can follow the process.

The scoring is quite basic - each section is marked Excellent (four points), Very Good (three points), Good (two points), Satisfactory (one point) and Poor (Nul points). Your job as a garden maker is to get 30 points out of a maximum 36 and, if you succeed, then you will walk away with an RHS gold medal and the bragging rights that go with it.

Gold (gold) always believe in your soul

It used to be 28 points but we made it more difficult - not because we are evil but because a gold medal is exceptional. Anyone who has any idea of the amount of work and passion that goes into a show garden knows that to win any medal at any RHS Show is an enormous achievement. Getting a gold medal is (and should be) hard.

Saturday judging takes most of the day with the three Assessors spending at least half an hour on each garden. By the end of the day, they will have made copious notes (helped by the secretary who is part of the RHS Shows team and is also responsible for the liberal supply of coffee and Haribo Starmix upon which the judging process depends) and have come up with a recommendation for a medal.

Judgement day

Sunday morning, bright and early, the three assessing judges are joined by four more judges (making a full team of seven) and they go around again, stopping on each garden to review all nine criteria, to hear what the advance guard is suggesting and to have lots of conversations. Yes we do disagree - a lot - but it is always good humoured, patient and measured. Always!

This takes most of Sunday. Eventually we have probed, twiddled, explored and analysed every garden and come up with a set of results with which we are happy. It ain’t over yet though - we go and sit somewhere (ideally there will be biscuits) and have a further meeting where we will go through all the criteria again just to be absolutely sure.

This meeting is carried out under the supervision of the moderator - another judge with a slightly different job.

The moderator (which this year will be me) is a senior judge (senior as in experience not in years - I am, after all, sprightly and youthful!) who has kept an eye on the proceedings all the way through the past few days. I arrived on Friday to look at all the gardens, I accompanied the assessors and the judges on both days. I don’t have a vote but my job is to ensure that there is consistency, fairness and that all the criteria have been discussed and applied with diligence and that we have given the best possible medal to everyone.

So, by yesterday (Sunday) evening, we were all done. Medals were assigned, Best Construction Award allocated and the Best in Show decided.

Feedback fun

There is one more thing to do - once the medals have been dished out tomorrow morning two of the judges will go round the gardens and talk to all of the designers (and their teams) to explain exactly why they were awarded the medal they were given. This is sometimes a pleasure and sometimes very hard. These people have given at least a year of their lives to these gardens. It is they who have made the show exciting for the visitors so it is important that we are open about our decisions. They may not always agree with us but they need to be happy that the process has been fair, thorough, objective and transparent.

The public might also disagree with our decisions but they get the chance to have their say later in the week when the results of the People's Choice Awards are announced. In pretty much every year since this award was introduced the public choice is different to the Judges' decision. There is a simple explanation to this: the public vote for the garden that they like most. The one in which they would feel most comfortable, the one with the most appealing back story or the one that they think is unbeatably beautiful. All of these are emotional responses which are important but we cannot judge objectively if we allow what we like or feel to intrude. What I like will be different to what you like which will be different to what Fred or Mabel like. We need to have a  simple but rigid system in order to be able to properly judge gardens that are so very different. Hence the long and involved process over the past few days.

I still have to keep my lip zipped until tomorrow.

Pucker up, buttercup

The cats will escape from the bag at about 7am on Tuesday when the RHS shows team will be scattering medal cards, the BBC will be snuffling around for tears and reactions, the public will be admitted and all the tension and stress of the past few weeks will be released. There is usually some controversy, some joy, some relief, a fair bit of drinking and a lot of sleeping but, in the meantime, there are people out there whom I have not yet hugged...