You may have heard or read about it in the press, but there was quite a hoo-ha about the revelation that three gardens at the Show had been designed by AI and that a well-known (and well-respected) garden designer was launching an AI app to do the job he was trained to do.
This created an inevitable uproar and there was a lot of chat online and in the media about how appalling this was and how a bot could never take the place of a human with the same results.
As ever, the truth was a little different from the headlines.
The three gardens were not any of the ones you may have seen on Main Avenue.
Certificate in Practical Horticulture taking cuttings (Image: Norfolk School of Gardening)
They were small, adjacent to each other, and made up the trade stand of the new business launched by Matt Keightley.
They demonstrated what his new app, Spacelift, was capable of in terms of designing a space and selecting hard landscaping materials as well as plants to fill it.
We train garden designers and inevitably some of them had contacted me, outraged that this innovation should have been given a space and therefore platform at Chelsea.
So I headed to the stand, had a look at the gardens, and had to acknowledge that I would be pretty happy if I moved into a house with any of those well-designed outdoor spaces.
I found Matt and we ended up having a long chat.
He would be the first to say that he is not trying to do his fellow designers out of a job.
He sees his mission as growing the market for designed gardens.
In other words, the clients he hopes to attract are probably never going to hire a garden designer.
They don’t have that kind of budget.
But they would like to create a beautiful space and fill it with plants which will thrive in their particular soil and aspect.
Spacelift Chelsea garden (Image: Norfolk School of Gardening)
The app will help with all of that.
I suspect it will also take some of the clients away from designers at the lower end of the market, but frankly if Matt hadn’t come up with this idea someone else would have done, and the good thing is that his app is filled with his ideas and principles as ‘guardrails’, it is not scraping the web as large language models do.
This conversation will continue and Matt will be coming to the School later in the year to talk to our students.
We really look forward to that.
These are some of the excellent courses upcoming which still have spaces:
Advanced Practical Gardening – 10th June (monthly course)
Developing an Annual Maintenance Plan – 17th June
Summer Pruning – 24th June
Advanced Practical Gardening – 1st July (monthly course)
Introduction to Garden Design – starting 17th September
Certificate in Practical Horticulture – starting 18th September
Plants for Free – 23rd September
Valeriana officinailis (Image: Norfolk School of Gardening)
Plant of the Week
Valeriana officinalis, commonly known as common valerian, is a hardy herbaceous perennial native to Europe and parts of Asia, including the UK.
Found naturally in damp meadows, riverbanks, and woodland edges, it produces tall stems topped with clusters of fragrant pale pink to white flowers from early to mid-summer.
These blooms are highly attractive to bees, butterflies, and other pollinating insects.
Valeriana officinailis (Image: Norfolk School of Gardening)
The plant can reach 1.5 metres in height, adding movement and texture to naturalistic borders.
It thrives in full sun or partial shade and moist, fertile soil.
Traditionally valued for its medicinal properties, it is also an excellent choice for wildlife-friendly gardens.
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