Fashion Revolution showcases textile garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Not-for-profit campaign group Fashion Revolution has unveiled a garden highlighting natural dyes and plant fibres at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show by garden designer Lottie Delamain.

Supported by Project Giving Back, the ‘A Textile Garden for Fashion Revolution’ highlights how plants have played a fundamental role in fashion, as dyes, fibres, floral motifs and botanical folklore and showcases sustainable solutions by re-establishing the connection between plants and textiles.

Delamain has designed the garden to imitate a textile, with planting in distinctive blocks of colour to create the impression of a woven fabric. It features plants used as fibres or textile dyes in commercial or craft use, such as woad, weld, madder, flax and nettle. While shallow reflective pools represent dye baths, with fabric or fibres soaking in natural dyes, alongside a series of paved seams will lead through the planting.

Fashion Revolution presents a garden featuring natural dyes and plant fibres

In a statement, Delamain said: “We can have any fabric, material, ink, or dye shipped directly to our door. We have a bottomless choice of materials from which to design and create. And we are wholly divorced from the practices, skills and methods required to grow and produce these materials.

“This became the founding principle behind the garden – I wanted to challenge myself to create something using the resources we have readily available, using a restricted palette that would force a new creative approach, that explored the lost connection between plants and textiles.”

It is hoped that the garden will inspire visitors to rethink the link between what we can grow and what we wear and ask #whatsinmyclothes?, as well as be encouraged to try dyeing with plants at home and create a mini-dye garden.

After the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the garden will be relocated to Headington School in Oxford, where Kate Turnbull, head of fashion and textiles design, has developed a new syllabus which includes the study of plants used for textiles dyes and fibres. The garden will be reimagined in two parts, as a working dye garden for the Textile Design students, and as a Colour Wheel garden, designed to inspire students across the school about the myriad roles plants play in our lives.