Collaboration between leading garden designer and Microsoft to go on display at Chelsea flower show 2025 Hardcore gardeners sometimes, when no one else is listening, talk quietly to their prize blooms. But at next year’s Chelsea flower show, visitors will be encouraged to have a chat with its first ever AI-powered garden. The garden designer Tom Massey has partnered with Microsoft to create the Avanade “intelligent” garden. Sensors in the soil are partnered with an AI trained on Royal Horticultural Society plant data and gardening advice, meaning visitors can ask the garden: “How are you?” Continue reading...

I’m no expert, but knowing my neighborhood’s trees and flowers by name makes me feel grounded Eighteen months ago, I adopted a dog. Now I’m out on the streets of Brooklyn with my hound mix for at least an hour a day, strolling and wrestling discarded chicken bones from her jaws. You notice a lot when you visit the same few blocks over and over: which avenues are the quietest, or when the rusty scaffolding around a nearby building vanishes overnight. Most of all, I love to admire neighborhood greenery. I’m an adoring fan of the tulips, peonies and dogwood flowers that burst forth in the spring. Yet I quickly realized how limited my plant vocabulary was. Yes, I knew that was a silver birch, because of its papery bark. But what was that taller tree, glossy and looming, or that pale shrub with tiny, ornate leaves? I grew up in Australia, where the vegetation is pretty different from that of the US north-east, and I really hadn’t made an effort to learn about the locals. It felt disrespectful, to say the least. Continue reading...