Sarah Eberle wins Chelsea flower show top prize, Perennial prize
Sarah Eberle won the top prize at the Chelsea flower show for a perennial garden designed for the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The garden was built around the idea of the countryside at the edge of towns and cities, and the judging panel called it mesmerising.
Eberle said she was “thrilled to bits” with the award. Her win places her among only three women to have taken best in show at Chelsea as solo designers in the show’s 100-year history.
Sarah Eberle at Chelsea
The winning garden featured a giant, sleeping woman carved out of a fallen tree. Chris Bailes, chair of the judging panel, said it combined “elements of myth and remarkable theatre” and that the planting showed “an exceptionally rare sense of atmosphere.”
Bailes also pointed to “unexpected beauty” in a concrete drain that had been repurposed from an agricultural accessory into a water feature using common duckweed. Those details helped turn the CPRE brief into a garden that the panel judged at the top of the show.
CPRE countryside message
Eberle said the project carried a message that was personal to her. “This garden’s mission is very personal to me. I am a country girl through and through so I embody the same message and beliefs that the Campaign to Protect Rural England and this garden holds,” she said.
CPRE describes those green spaces as vital links between people and nature. In this garden, that idea was translated into a showpiece at Chelsea, where the prize also lifted Eberle further into a very small group of solo women winners.
Women designers at Chelsea
The award landed against a wider discussion about female representation on the show’s main avenue. Clare Coulson said that last year Jo Thompson’s garden was the only main avenue garden designed by a woman. She added that this year, of nine main avenue show gardens, there are two female designers.
That count leaves Eberle’s win unusual even by Chelsea standards. Coulson also said the lack of female designers at the show remains a regular conversation among designers and gardeners, while Elizabeth Tyler said her studio burst out “in incredulity” at the number of male names still attached to major awards.
For readers following the show’s judging, the immediate result is simple: Eberle has the top prize, CPRE has a winning garden carrying its countryside message, and Chelsea’s small list of solo women best-in-show winners has gained another name. The question left for the rest of the show is whether that count starts to change beyond one award.
