Key themes at this year’s Hampton Court Flower Show include getting kids interested in all things horticultural, ‘growing your own’ and ‘tasting your own’ fruit and veg, as well as sustainable gardening.

Hampton Court Palace Flower Show is championing the ‘Grow Your Own Veg’ theme and many of the show gardens reflect this, the RHS has reported. Among these will be edible gardens like The Torres Tapas Garden, by Anthea Guthrie, which features Mediterranean vegetables used in authentic tapas dishes to complement the wines of Torres; or Francesca Cleary and Ian Lawrence’s ‘Mange Tout’, a decorative vegetable garden where everything, including the flowers, are edible.

Designed as a place to experiment with vegetable seeds, A Hampshire Garden shows a range of traditional and modern cucumber cultivars grown by Anstey Junior School in Alton. For the foodie who would like to grow their own organic meal, gardens include Maurice Butcher’s The Giving Garden - designed with soil to plate menus in mind.

Chris Gutteridge and Anthony Cox’s Child’s Play is about fooling around outdoors, while Adam White and Andree Davies’s ‘Playscape - Community Play Garden’, focuses on an organic approach to play, drawing inspiration from a time when a tree trunk could provide hours of entertainment.

Educating young minds is behind Chris Beardshaw’s ‘The Growing Schools Garden - Learning Outside the Classroom’. Over 30 schools took part in designing, planting and growing the garden. In Learning To Look After Our World the children of Alton Infant School have come up with a design that replicates their own school garden - an area where they have learnt about conservation, recycling, organic gardening, plant and animal life cycles.

A number of gardens deal with the environmental issues resulting from the destruction of front gardens in favour of off-road parking. Heidi Harvey and Fern Alder’s Full Frontal small garden addresses this by blending a permeable hard surface - ideal for parking - with planting to support wildlife.

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