A selection of children from schools across London will don their judges hats at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show with the introduction of a new award category.

Over 70 children will take on the task of judging this year’s show gardens, crowning one of them the inaugural RHS Children’s Choice Award winner.

Designer’s will be judged against whether their gardens are a “good place to play” and if the garden is “attractive to wildlife”, says RHS director general, Clare Matterson.

The junior judges will also be visiting the RHS No Adults Allowed Garden, designed by Harry Holding– an unjudged garden that highlights the importance of accessibility to nature from a young age.

Ideas for the garden arose last year after the RHS held its first children’s picnic, which the Duchess of Cambridge attended alongside 100 students.

Over the course of this year the RHS will also be granting just under £3m to 488 nurseries, schools and colleges in areas where there is a distinct lack of nature to create their own green spaces, on behalf of the Department for Education.

Funding forms part of the National Education Nature Parks programme in partnership with the Natural History Museum and RHS and funded by the Department for Education to connect young people with nature through a series of mapping and monitoring activities.

The Nature Park launched in October 2023 and so far has 2400 education settings across England signed up. On this year’s Outdoor Classroom Day on 23 May, the National Education Nature Park programme is calling on teachers and pupils to discover habitats in their school, nursery or college grounds and be ‘habitat heroes’.

From September, schools will be able to register to attend free Nature Park taster workshops within the five RHS Gardens to try out some Nature Park activities and gain inspiration to make their school sites greener.