Chelsea Flower Show will explore new territory this year with the very first underwater garden

The Chelsea Flower Show will explore new territory later this year with the first underwater garden in its 111-year history.

The Seawilding Garden will feature the world’s only flowering underwater plant: seagrass.

The marine plant will be housed in a 3,000 liter (660 gallon) capacity, visible to visitors through the walls of a perspex tank.

Underwater gardens have often been featured, such as the Beatle’s Octopus’s Gardens and TVs in The Adventures of Spongebob Squarepants.

But they have never been at the RHS event before – and never before have gardeners had to use snorkels to create a Chelsea garden.

Britain has lost around 95 percent of our seagrass meadows, but efforts are underway to bring this back along Britain’s coasts.

And after the show, the seagrass will be replanted underwater, marking the first time a Chelsea Garden has become an underwater habitat.

Although little known to many of us, the plant is an unsung hero in the fight against climate change and in supporting fish and other marine life that shelter within it.

The garden’s designer Ryan McMahon, of Musa Landscapes, said he was inspired by the charity Seawilding, which helps restore seagrass at Loch Craignish, Argyll and Loch Broom in Wester Ross.

“What the sea wilders do is effectively garden, but underwater they go to the sea lake with a trowel and a snorkel and wade out there and dig up rhizomes,” which are used to grow more seagrass on land-based tanks, to be used later return to the seabed.

Unlike seaweed – a type of algae – seagrass is a real plant, which sheds leaves in the fall, grows again in the spring and blooms and sets seed in the summer.

Globally, seagrass absorbs about 10 percent of the world’s CO2, even though it only covers 0.2 percent of the ocean floor.

It also helps combat coastal erosion by binding the seabed with its roots and slowing the impact of waves when they hit the coastline.

But it needs clear water to thrive and has been damaged in recent years by pollution and sediment in the water blocking light around the UK coast and worldwide.

The garden will feature sandstone cliffs, a saltwater pool, a pebble beach and wetland areas, as well as rare plants never before seen in Chelsea, such as the sedge, which prefers boggy soil.

Mr McMahon said that although the lake looks like “a beautiful wild area, it is unfortunately quite lacking underwater” because so much seagrass has been lost.

He added that biodiversity will also help British fish populations if we can breed more of them along the coast.

It is hoped the garden will inspire ‘new conversations’ about seagrass recovery in Britain and globally.

Mr McMahon admits this is not something an ordinary gardener could do, but the techniques developed by Seawilding will help efforts to regrow seagrass in Britain.

He said: ‘Seagrass beds are great nurseries for commercially viable fish species that we eat.’

Seawilding has planted 400,000 seagrass seeds and restored 350,000 native oysters in Loch Craignish alone.

In another first, like the Seawilding Garden, sponsored by Project Giving Back, the show will feature a British rainforest garden.

The garden will highlight the threatened Atlantic temperate rainforest habitat that once enveloped the west coast of Britain, the Isle of Ireland and the Isle of Man.

Designer Zoe Claymore’s garden will feature a raised wooden walkway that meanders over moss-covered ground past a tumbling waterfall, lichen-covered birch trees, a rare royal fern and bluebells, marigolds and foxgloves, supported by a fern and moss wall which spans the eight gardens. meters width of the garden.