Postcards from Chelsea: The Missing Collector – could it be you?

One of our favourite things from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year was the Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden. We’ve provided items for the Plant Heritage team’s show displays for some years, so we were excited to see the Plant Heritage expertise put into a whole Chelsea garden for the first time.

This was a garden to delve into, highlighting the work of the National Collections in saving unique plant varieties that may be lost. The Missing Collector Garden put the collections fully in the spotlight, with 80 per cent of the garden covered in rich and varied planting, including plants from around 25 National Collections. The creative display in bright jewel tones was offset by deliciously lush green planting for shade. Plants spilled out of museum drawer-style planters and snaked between piles of reclaimed red sandstone books. A fantastical empty chair provided a seat of honour for an unknown plant collector.

The garden’s image of a wealth of accumulated plant knowledge and expertise really highlighted what a group effort the National Collections are: not only of the present custodians, but also of those working in centuries past.

Plant Heritage is the UK’s leading conservation charity for garden plants. A key part of Plant Heritage’s work is supporting the UK’s rich network of National Plant Collections®. Like a living library, there are 742 National Collections, with over 40 new ones accredited in 2025. Over 100,000 plants are now safeguarded across the UK, from the national rose collection at National Trust Mottisfont in Hampshire, to the Brodie collection of daffodils at Brodie Castle near Inverness.

The National Collections play a key role in safeguarding the future of garden plants in all their rich varieties. If a gardener has made it their life’s work to produce wonderful new varieties of a species, from the tiniest creeping alpine to the loftiest lime tree, inclusion in the appropriate National Collection will ensure that their work lives on. Many of the collections are an amalgamation of several lifetimes’ work.

The Chelsea garden also featured groups of a number of different plants which currently have no National Collection to give them a home. These include much-loved plants like Aquilegia and Verbascum. And here’s the powerful question posed by the Missing Collector garden: if there’s an official Collection missing for a plant that you love – could you be that missing collector?

National Collections are located in all sorts of unlikely places, including allotments and schools, pubs and prisons. If you’re passionate about a particular type of plant, you can search on the Plant Heritage website to see if a collection exists. If no collection has already been established, maybe that missing plant guardian could me you!

o0o

The Missing Collector garden was designed by the Planting Design Collective. Congratulations to them and to the whole team on a silver gilt medal for this colourful and inspiring garden.