The vegetable patch has had a reputation problem for decades. Somewhere between the allotment and the Alan Titchmarsh calendar, gardening became the pastime that style forgot. That era, it turns out, is over.

For a hobby involving mud, manure and ongoing hostilities with slugs, gardening has become remarkably fashionable. 

What was once the domain of wax jackets and retired colonels now attracts everyone from fashion executives to florists, royalty to Instagram tastemakers. King Charles III’s devotion to his gardens at Highgrove is well documented — and has since been commemorated in an ongoing collaboration collection with Burberry.

Of course, in Chelsea, gardening has never been merely a hobby. Long before the annual May migration of linen blazers, show medals and tactical espadrilles, this was market-garden country, with beans, cabbages and asparagus growing where there are now boutiques, restaurants and highly considered window boxes. The Thames made it ideally placed to supply London with produce, while the Chelsea Physic Garden, established by the Apothecaries in 1673, gave the area serious botanical credentials. 

Add the Royal Hospital Chelsea, home to the Chelsea Flower Show since 1913, and Chelsea in Bloom, which now sends the season spilling out into the streets, and the point is clear: gardening here has always had range. Kitchen gardens and medicinal herbs, glasshouses and grand squares, floral spectacle and very serious secateurs. The current fashion for gardening may feel newly polished, but in Chelsea it is less a trend than a return to type.

Part of its newfound appeal among the style set, perhaps, is that gardening asks us to slow down. Seed sales surged after Covid, cutting gardens appeared in suburban back gardens and a generation that had previously regarded the outdoors mainly as somewhere to drink Aperol decided it wanted to grow its own dahlias. In 2025, the RHS reported that cutting gardens were among the fastest-growing horticultural trends.

There is something in gardening, too, that goes beyond the horticultural. Alessandro Michele — now at Valentino, and the man who spent a decade making flora-and-fauna prints the visual language of Gucci — put it as well as anyone: “Care of things that grow is something religious. Caring for plants and animals is a way to talk with the earth.” The garden, it turns out, is where fashion goes when it wants to feel something.

Perhaps that’s the secret. Gardening offers the satisfaction of making something beautiful, with the added bonus that occasionally you get to eat it.

Of course, the current penchant for plants is hardly new. Vita Sackville-West — novelist, Bloomsbury habitué, Virginia Woolf’s great love and the inspiration for Orlando — created the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent and understood the romance of gardening long before the algorithm got involved.

Fashion has long found inspiration in the garden. Erdem Moralıoğlu’s first menswear collection drew on Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature and the extraordinary garden he created at Dungeness. Lucinda Chambers, the former British Vogue fashion director and co-founder of Collagerie, divides her time between fashion and her much-loved gardens in London and France. Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, has spoken enthusiastically about the pleasures of growing vegetables and tending her own garden.

Anya Hindmarch opened the pop-up ‘Pont St Garden Centre’ in May 2022, stacking it with pots, hanging baskets, seed packets, garden tools and other necessary horticultural accoutrements.

Even David Beckham has embraced the good life. His Cotswolds vegetable garden has become a recurring feature on Instagram, where broad beans and baskets of cucumbers are documented with the same dedication he once brought to free kicks.

And every May, the Chelsea Flower Show brings enough Panama hats, floral dresses and beautifully cut linen to the neighbourhood to constitute a particularly niche fashion week.

Once you have decided to actually garden — not to pose in one, not commission one, but to pull on the gloves and go at it with secateurs — the question of equipment becomes unexpectedly compelling.

Chelsea regular and Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant is a devotee of Niwaki’s Tripod ladders, which he uses when pruning trees. The cult British-Japanese brand has quietly become the gardener’s equivalent of Le Creuset: beautifully made, immensely practical and capable of inspiring a degree of devotion that can seem slightly alarming to outsiders.

Its secateurs and pruning shears have developed a following among people who, strictly speaking, do not require professional-grade topiary scissors. Collaborations with Paul Smith, Oliver Spencer, Cubitts and The Newt have only cemented its credentials among design enthusiasts. And should the urge strike, a pair of Niwaki Sentei secateurs can be found at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

Peter Jones remains an excellent source of practical essentials, from trugs and tool kits to herbs and outdoor entertaining paraphernalia, while The Chelsea Gardener has been supplying green-fingered Londoners with plants and expertise for decades.

Naturally, every hobby has its dress code.

As for attire, a good sun hat is non-negotiable. Linen shirts, roomy baskets, practical boots and a gardening journal all have their place. The fantasy, of course, is less muddy allotment and more Vita Sackville-West meets ‘Rivals’.

If you’re going to spend a Sunday deadheading hydrangeas, you might as well do it elegantly.