Welcome to the Greener Skills garden at RHS Wisley

RHS horticultural engagement manager, Lewis George, introduces us to the wonderful Greener Skills project

Officially opened in October 2025, the Greener Skills garden at RHS Garden Wisley is the first of five such gardens we are growing across the RHS. These gardens are being developed primarily by the RHS New Shoots team, whose aim is to increase the number and diversity of people able to access horticultural careers. However, at Wisley the new space is extra special as it was developed jointly with our science and collections team and garden designer, Dave Green.

The purpose of the garden is two-fold. It is an opportunity to bring to life the research taking place in Hilltop, the home of gardening science, around planet-friendly gardening. Based around three key themes: water, biodiversity and carbon (more on these as you join us through the growing year), there are lots of tips and tricks to inspire our visitors and help them garden in a more sustainable way. As highlighted in our 2025 State of Gardening report, gardens make up “4.6 per cent of Great Britain’s land area – over three times the size of UK National Nature Reserves”, so gardeners have a huge opportunity to help tackle the climate crisis whilst simultaneously creating beautiful spaces for ourselves, our families and communities.

At the same time, the garden is a hands-on training hub for future horticulturists, as we recognise the skills shortage and seek to build future capacity for sustainable horticulture. The New Shoots team, along with adult learning, communities and secondary education teams will be using this space to equip as many people as possible with sustainable horticultural skills from ages 14 plus. And the best part – this means growing lots of amazing plants and beautiful seasonal displays for our visitors to enjoy throughout the year.

The garden is located within the wider orchard landscape at Wisley, between the vineyard and community allotments, and a short stroll from Hilltop and the World Food garden. This means we are lucky enough to have inherited some relatively young, but mature apple trees we can support budding horticulturists to learn skills on, such as winter and summer pruning, without fear of making mistakes.

We approached the build of the garden as environmentally sustainably as possible whilst accepting necessary trade-offs. A good example is in the hard landscaping – it was critical as much of the garden as possible is wheelchair accessible. This meant moving lots of soil (and bringing more on-site) to reduce the slope and bringing in materials such as Romsey path gravel. This, like all hard landscaping materials, has a carbon impact; however, we chose Romsey specifically as it was available locally (minimising transport) and is water permeable, minimising surface run-off and localised flooding. This gave us a wide outer path accessible to our visitors, and a network of slightly smaller paths throughout the inner garden. When we are running sessions with young people or vulnerable adults we will be restricting access to these internal areas, though at all other times we welcome visitors to explore the whole garden.

Other key features include; raised beds for accessible growing and seasonal displays, a large circular semi-open learning pavilion with solar panels, polytunnel for on-site propagation and summer edibles growing, the first RHS rain garden, wildlife pond, composting area, raised sand propagation area, low-growing wildflower lawns, assessment beds, composting toilet and 12 mixed perennial and shrub planting borders of varying sizes. These borders will be planted over the next three to four years - why so slow I hear you say? There are two principal reasons for practicing slow horticulture. We want to evolve the garden over time as sustainably as possible, meaning we will grow as much as possible from seed or cuttings within the garden. We will also plant in focussed areas each season to target our water use as efficiently as possible whilst establishing plants and (hopefully) minimising losses if we have dry springs and hot summers like 2025. As importantly, wherever possible the planting and propagating will be carried out by learners, so whilst my team and I will coach and support participants in planting skills, very little of it will be

physically carried out by us (this is a bit like asking someone who loves chocolate to watch others eat it whilst not having any themselves!).

We have made a start with perennial and tree planting on the largest border adjacent to the vehicle track, including Stachys byzantine (lamb’s ear), Dianella caerulea (flax lily) and a gorgeous small garden tree, Heptacodium miconioides (seven son flower tree) featuring fragrant white flowers in late summer to late autumn. More perennial planting will continue in this border in early spring. Elsewhere in the garden different groups, including Surrey University students and Bankside Open Spaces Trust Future Gardeners trainees helped plant almost two thousand bulbs last autumn. These included Tulipa ‘Crown of Negrita’ and ‘Dynasy’ as well as Narcissus including ‘Sailboat’ and ‘Sinopel’, which means we are looking forward to an instant pop of floriferous colour in the gardens first spring.

There is lots more to look forward to over the coming year. Our amazing youth volunteers are currently in the process of propagating the plants for their summer seasonal displays that will be planted out in our assessment beds in July (including one themed on medicinal plants). We are also busy sowing seeds for edible crops in the polytunnel that will benefit from additional heat, including peppers and tomatoes, and we will be making the most of the yet to be planted borders by filling them with lots of annual flowers for cutting and drying. I am especially looking forward to seeing how seed sown plants such as the annual Aster Callistephus chinensis ‘Duchesse Crimson’ perform both in the borders and gracing some lucky colleague’s vase!

The Greener Skills garden is a unique space for RHS Wisley, and we hope you will join us in witnessing how it evolves over its first year, how we learn to garden sustainably within it and how we, inevitably, embrace the failures!

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