Affinity sows seeds of water efficiency at Chelsea Flower Show

Nestled among the vividly imagined and pristinely presented scenes at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, was a love song to endangered chalk streams. Not a love song in its traditional sense, more of a heavy petal banger unashamedly stealing the limelight.

Inspired by the precious waterways that run through the Chilterns, the creation had a thorny message to convey: all of our actions have an impact on the world around us.

Affinity Water, which has been rooting for the cause through its Save Our Streams campaign since 2020, sponsored the prize-winning Water Saving Garden at the most-esteemed gardening event of the year.

On first hearing the term ‘drought garden’, you would be forgiven for picturing a barren landscape featuring withering Mediterranean plants and hardy cacti.

This, however, was anything bud that.

Blooming fox gloves and verdantly rich bursts of lupins were interspersed between irises and ever green climbers which sprung up from a patio of bamboo with a copper running water feature inbuilt to one of the planters’ irrigation system.

Sam Proctor, the garden designer, explains she wanted to create a water efficient garden without compromising on beauty or enjoyability.

And it clearly resonated with the throngs of green-fingered visitors who had a never-ending stream of questions about the irrigation.

Proctor was awarded a bronze medal at the show and received royal approval from the King, who stopped by earlier in the week to admire the wall-hanging horizontal succulent frames.

The Water Saving Garden features bespoke planting containers with built-in reservoirs of water. Proctor explains the containers retain rainwater and can be topped up via water butts that fill from roof runoff. The system, including the two 200 litre water butts, has 506 litres of total storage. This can support the plants in the Affinity garden to withstand 10 weeks of drought conditions.

Affinity knows that changing how customers use water cannot be done with negative messaging alone. It wanted to sponsor a garden that could show people what water efficiency could look like.

Against the backdrop of the tranquil garden scene, Lynne McCarthy, campaign manager at Affinity tells Utility Week: “We knew we needed to inspire people, we can’t just say ‘no’. We want people to see that gardening like this is achievable and inspirational.”

Affinity’s region is home to many of the UK’s chalk streams, which the company is working to reduce the rate of abstraction from to preserve these resources.

The Environment Agency lowered abstraction licences nationwide at sensitive locations to restore flow levels at sensitive waterways.

Between 2015 and 2020 Affinity cut abstraction from chalk groundwater sources by 42 megalitres a day. By 2025 it is aiming for this to be cut by a further 36 megalitres a day. The pressure is truly on to convince customers to be mindful about consumption to leave more water in the environment.

Its average per capita consumption is among the highest in England at 157 litres per person daily, partly due to a high proportion of customer households that have large gardens.

“We’re not asking people to stop taking care of their gardens, but to do it in an efficient way,” McCarthy says.

She explains that the company wanted to partner with a water-efficient garden at Chelsea to show behaviour change does not have to mean compromising on having a beautiful garden.

“Behaviour change needs consistency, education and engagement,” McCarthy said. “We know that not every customer is the same and we need to find ways to connect with them about their usage.”

She says the idea was to educate people in different ways to address how everyone can become more mindful of water stress and climate change.

The company’s Save Our Streams campaign has helped save more than one billion litres of water that can be left in the chalk streams.

Sustainability ran through the annual highlight of every garden lover’s calendar, with two other displays on show focused on water usage.

There was Water Aid’s rainwater harvesting garden, in which Monty Don was filming for Gardener’s World under the ornate pavilion of rainwater funnels that fed a feature stream below.

Elsewhere, FloodRe’s flood resilient garden was packed full of plants that slow the flow of water at times of heavy downpour – or the most stunningly beautiful SUDS you could ever hope to see.

Like all good love songs, this ode to water resilience has been firmly planted in my mind in the days since the show. No doubt the green-fingered brigade at the Chelsea Flower Show will be sprouting all about it up and down the country.

And I for one think that’s unbe-leaf-ably thorn-tastic!