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.
It is not easy to automate pruning a climbing rose, or working out how many self-sown Stipa tenuissima plants is just one too many in a planting scheme
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. But gardeners have still been fulminating among the fumitories about it. Their charges are numerous. Massey is collaborating with Microsoft on the project, so one accusation is that he has sold out to Big Tech. Some folk just dislike anything Big, but others are genuinely worried that AI might replace the skilled and already disgracefully undervalued work of a gardener. Another is that AI is a particularly water-intensive technology, requiring vast amounts for its cooling towers – something Massey should be more worried about given his Chelsea garden this year was for WaterAid. The tenor of many of the angry responses was that he’s sold out and he’s selling gardeners up the (dried-up) river.
In the tradition of any social media storm, Massey attempted to clarify matters on Instagram, arguing that like it or not, AI is already around, and that he was hoping to be part of a movement that could ‘build something that might inspire, might genuinely be useful, might actually aid our industry’. When I spoke to him this week, he admitted he was taken aback by the backlash to the garden: ‘I was surprised, to be honest, by the strength of response that it got, but I think the breadth of issues that have been brought into it means it is understandably a lightning rod for lots of different fears and worries.’ He lists the concerns that people have put to him: ‘One is job security; another one is fair pay for skilled professionals in the industry. Another one is technology and nature connection and whether the two things can ever go hand in hand. Another one is biodiversity and sustainable resource use. And I can 100 per cent understand all of those concerns. I’ve been thinking, if someone else put this out and said they were doing a garden with AI at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, I would probably feel equal parts sceptical and also very intrigued.’
To be fair to Massey, if anyone can pull off an AI garden at Chelsea, it’s probably him. He’s not a gimmick designer. Although he is very fond of big, attention-grabbing ideas within his gardens, they are always thought through to a level of detail that goes far beyond a press release. He was the designer to have the first fully organic garden at Chelsea. He has also developed a type of terrazzo that uses rubble from London’s building sites, and has written a fascinating book called Resilient Garden: Sustainable Gardening for a Changing Climate. This is not the 2020s version of James May’s plasticine garden at Chelsea, or indeed Diarmuid Gavin’s rockstar designs (Gavin, incidentally, was possibly the last person to have a Real Row in the gardening world, having such a bitter feud with fellow designer Andy Sturgeon that the pair nearly ended up in court back in 2007).
Massey sees the AI garden as being a way of making sure that technology can be used to help plants not only survive but thrive in hostile environments such as built-up urban areas, where there often isn’t much, if any, budget for maintenance and care. He points to research by Dark Matter Labs showing that up to half of trees planted in urban environments die within ten years. This sounds pretty generous: chances are that 90 per cent of those failures are within the first year. Most trees are planted with great fanfare and then forgotten, left to fend for themselves.
Gardening expert John Little gave one of his characteristically amusing lectures at the Beth Chatto Symposium a few years ago where he showed a photo of some local dignitaries planting a tree using a three-handled spade. He then suggested with a wry smile: ‘They get the photos, everyone goes away, the tree dies, no one looks after it, total waste of money.’ No money goes into looking after the tree once it has been planted. Little was making the case for spending less on the garden itself and more on someone to look after it so that it still exists in years to come. The lecture theatre cheered when he made that argument – and those cheers contained the same sentiment that is driving some of the complaints about Massey’s garden now.
Gardeners – real, skilled, gardeners – are underpaid and underused. Even a head gardener, who will have trained for years, taking practical and theoretical professional exams as well as working their way through the hierarchy in public or private gardens, might only be paid around £35,000 a year. The public doesn’t tend to think of gardening as a skilled job, which is why there are so many people who offer their services as gardeners when they are in fact just pushing a lawn mower and butchering shrubs at the wrong time of year. A friend who is an accountant recently remarked with some surprise to me that the people working in a very famous public garden she had visited were ‘so knowledgeable’. She was astonished when I pointed out that they would have trained for as long as she did. David Cameron once lumped gardening in with litter picking as an unskilled occupation, despite ample evidence to the contrary (including in the beautifully maintained Downing Street garden). Even gardens that are maintained well rarely give much credit to the skilled people working on them: Monty Don doesn’t keep his two full-time gardeners at Longmeadow a secret, but it would be nice to at least hear of them once in a while on the BBC’s flagship gardening show, which often seems to suggest that it’s just the presenter and his dogs keeping that garden looking so beautiful.
Gardeners are already very sore about the lack of value accorded to their work, and so a Chelsea design that might threaten that further probably came at the worst time. Massey, though, is hopeful that AI could help those gardeners, not replace them. He feels that while AI and automation can enhance some aspects of gardening and landscape management, it can’t replace or replicate the human awareness, sensitivity, creativity and physical problem-solving that skilled gardeners bring. It is not easy to automate pruning a climbing rose, or working out how many self-sown Stipa tenuissima plants is just one too many in a planting scheme. But where AI could be useful is in those schemes that John Little spoke about, where there is no council budget for maintenance once the mayor and his three-handled spade have departed. Those budgets aren’t coming back, and those working on big public realm schemes acknowledge that. Nigel Dunnett, whose Grey to Green scheme in Sheffield was designed on the explicit understanding that there was barely any maintenance budget at all, was one of the more positive about Massey’s garden, writing on Instagram: ‘Perhaps the greatest application is outside the public garden, but in our public spaces, where we desperately need transformational greening to meet all the challenges we face, and AI may be a valuable tool in enabling that to happen.’
There’s an interesting contrast here with healthcare, where medics are largely upbeat about how AI could help them do their jobs more efficiently and don’t seem at all worried that it will take work away from them. The difference, of course, is that doctors are relatively well-remunerated and hugely respected within society, whereas gardeners are often treated like school dropouts. Maybe that’s the challenge for Massey’s next Chelsea garden.
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