They liked it! We were awarded a Gold Medal.

And more than that: to get gold for an educational display you need 13 or more marks out of 15. We got 15.

The only comment that they would like us to note for future displays (and we have NO such plans!) was that perhaps there was too much information in the 'Growing Meconopsis' section.

There were crowds around the display almost all the time the show was open: six days (including Press day), most of them for twelve hours. That is a lot of people!

They were attracted first by the colourful displays of flowers in the Wild and Garden sections. Then many of them spent a long time absorbing the information in the Growing section.

And lots of them bought seeds, mainly of a few Meconopsis species (particularly the big blue poppy kinds), but also of some Primula that were part of the Wild display.

The public are always appreciative: working on a display at Chelsea restores your belief in people! It is completely different from the world of the media and social media.

Comments from top horticulturalists and press writers are particularly gratefully received. We can't quote them all here, but it would involve a lot of bragging!

Robin Lane Fox, who has written for the Financial Times every week for many decades, wrote that we would receive his personal gold medal for a floral display, and what he said to us was even better than that. He thought that it was the best thing in the entire show!

Stephen Anderton of the Daily Telegraph said something similar.

John Grimshaw, who is the editor of Curtis's Botanical Magazine and Editor-in-chief of Trees and Shrubs Online, wrote a wonderful blog on Instagram, with lots of photographs. He showed that he really understood what it was all about.

We featured as one of "12 inspiring ideas to take home from RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025", published before the show. After the show there were reports in the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, Gardens Illustrated Magazine, and Scotland Grows online magazine. 

Tom Stuart Smith, one of the top garden designers (he was designer for the new RHS Garden Bridgewater), wrote this on his blog.

This was Tom's photograph of Meconopsis simikotensis. It wasn't just never before seen in cultivation, but was almost certainly the first plant of the species ever to have been cultivated. It attracted a lot of attention throughout the show - including from bumble bees! One visitor said that they had just stood and watched the bees for an hour.