The row over Chelsea’s AI garden

The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite so striking.

Since the line-up for the 2025 Royal Horticultural Society version of London Fashion Week was announced last week, gardeners have been absolutely and abnormally furious about the first shoots of AI appearing. Massey’s garden promises to be an ‘intelligent’ one, using AI trained on RHS plant data and advice to tell visitors how the plot is doing. Wireless sensors in the soil will measure moisture and nutrients and communicate the information to a computer, which will then be able to say what the garden needs: a bit more water or some pruning.

At the press conference, journalists were amused by how long an existing RHS app called ‘ChatBotanist’ took to tell attendees when they should be planting tulip bulbs, and relieved to hear from Massey that it was him rather than a bot who had actually designed the garden.