Pippa Lucas: From Show Gardens to Home Gardens - Rethinking Sustainability

As I scroll through my Instagram feed, the Chelsea Flower Show takes over right now. Frothy, wild-style plantings spill across my screen, nestled in artfully placed boulders and bordered by natural stone crazy paving (yes, it’s back). At a glance, these gardens appear to be in harmony with nature. But the irony isn’t lost on me: these ephemeral creations, built at great environmental cost, are some of the least sustainable landscapes around.

Every year, materials are trucked into the heart of London, meticulously arranged for a week of display, then dismantled and redistributed. Plants, rocks, timber, and all. It’s a spectacle of horticultural artistry, no doubt, but one that sits uneasily with today’s urgent need for sustainability.

I’ve been a professional gardener for nearly 15 years, working for the last 9 at the Auckland Botanic Gardens. But now, for the first time, I have the joy, and challenge of planting my own garden here in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. This 500 square metre patch of volcanic soil is my blank canvas, and I’m approaching it with a different lens.

In public gardens, we have budgets, compost yards, and resources. At home, my wallet controls the spend- except, strangely, when it comes to plants. There, my restraint mysteriously disappears. I’m learning that sustainability at home isn’t just about plant choice; it’s about how I work with the site, the waste I generate, and the systems I put in place to manage it.

One decision I made early: I won’t water the garden. I grew up in Central Otago, so I am not afraid of the arid. After a year of watching the site, I’ve learned how dry it gets over summer, and I’m committed to selecting plants that can thrive in both our humid, wet winters and our parched summers. “Right plant, right place”. Beth Chatto’s mantra plays on repeat in my mind, an earworm as catchy as a popular song to a gardener. It’s a guiding principle for any sustainable garden, and one that brings a surprising amount of joy. It’s like matchmaking, finding the plant that doesn’t just survive, but sings in its chosen spot.

But even with the best intentions, there are bumps along the way. I feel a pang of guilt every time I have loaded green waste into the trailer for a trip to the dump. Our new 400L compost bin is brilliant for food scraps and smaller pruning’s and clippings. But between pruning the established trees and still editing the garden, we’re generating more green waste than I feel it can handle. Unlike at work at the Botanic Gardens’ great compost pile—big enough to handle anything we throw at it.

There’s a tension, I’ve discovered, between editing a garden into something beautiful and managing the waste that process creates. Sustainability, it turns out, isn’t always tidy. How much can I leave to decompose in place before my carefully chosen plants get swamped with the matter.

This weekend, we’re taking down the old brick chimney from a fireplace we can’t use. But unlike the show gardens at Chelsea, where materials are trucked in for a fleeting moment of display, we’re keeping those bricks on site. They’ll find a new life in the garden—maybe as paving, small retaining walls, or even an outdoor fireplace we can actually enjoy. It feels good to keep those materials in circulation, rooted in the story of the place.

The Chelsea Flower Show might inspire planting styles, but it’s in our home gardens that real, lasting change can happen. Sustainability isn't about perfection. It's about progress, intention, and working with what we have. It’s about building gardens that don’t just look natural, but are natural, resilient, regenerative, and in rhythm with their place, the biodiversity and the fauna.