Rachel De Thame Returns to BBC Team for RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026
rachel de thame is back on screen as part of the presenting team for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026. The move puts her into one of the broadcaster’s best-known gardening slots after years spent away from modelling and acting. It also brings a familiar face back to a programme where presentation credentials matter as much as plant knowledge.
RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026
Rachel de Thame has already been part of Gardeners' World, and the new Chelsea assignment extends that television role into another major gardening broadcast. For viewers, it means the show’s presentation team includes someone whose public profile was built across more than one career before horticulture became the focus.
Her route was not a straight one. She was raised near North London, studied ballet at the Royal Ballet School, contracted glandular fever at age 15, and gave up her dream of a dancing career at age 19. After studying drama and History of Art, she worked at an art dealers in London, then was recruited by a modelling agency while pregnant with her first baby.
From 1998 to 2018
By 1998, she had appeared in the mini-series Merlin and the British feature film Bodywork. She also enrolled at the English Gardening School in the late 1990s, the pivot that moved her toward the gardening career that later made her a regular television name. That shift is the real through line here: a presenter with screen experience, but one whose authority on the subject comes from training and work in horticulture, not just on-camera familiarity.
In 1986, she married Stephen Colover and had two children, Lauren and Joe, before divorcing in the early 1990s. She later married Gerard de Thame, and they had two daughters, Emma and Olivia. Lauren, now an illustrator, worked with her mother on drawings for A Flower Garden for Pollinators, which gives the family story a professional link rather than a purely personal one.
Gardeners' World and cancer
2018 brought the hardest complication: Rachel de Thame was diagnosed with breast cancer, wrote about dealing with it in The Times, and took a leave of absence from Gardeners' World while she underwent treatment. She said, “While one is grateful to have options, treatment is no walk in the park.” She added, “Strangely, though, I’ve also found that there are compensations. Top of the list is a renewed, almost desperate desire to get on with some of the things that for too long have lingered on a mental to-do list.”
For the Chelsea Flower Show team, that history makes the 2026 return more than a booking notice. It places a presenter with a long gardening pedigree back in a flagship programme after a period shaped by treatment and recovery, and the broadcast now carries the weight of that return as well as the show itself.
