You’ve been invited to be the sole American exhibitor among 87 at the 2025 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the horticultural equivalent of the Olympics. Dating to 1912, this isn’t just any flower show—it’s the flower show, held for five days each May on the hallowed grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, where British royalty strolls among the blooms on opening day.
Now for the catch: You have to pull this off from 3,760 miles away.
After he’d said yes and committed to the 2025 show—knowing he’d won half the battle—Art Chadwick faced a logistical nightmare that would make mission planners weep. The real challenge was just beginning. How do you transport an award-winning orchid exhibition across an ocean when international shipping laws won’t let you bring your own plants?
Short answer: You don’t. “Due to international shipping laws, we couldn’t bring our own orchids so we had to borrow plants from local growers,” Chadwick explains—a diplomatic way of saying he had to sweet-talk British orchid enthusiasts into sharing their prize specimens with him for one of the world’s most scrutinized flower shows.
Exhibition Expertise
His 28-foot exhibit space demanded the kind of theatrical staging that sort of had to rival those of a Broadway set designer. He filled it with rare Victorian-era orchid artifacts displayed in museum-quality cases—details the judges particularly appreciated. The showstopper was an architectural wall spanning the entire back of the exhibit, telling the story of orchid cultivation through photographs and text panels that traced everything from Victorian-era specimens to royal collections.
Orchids were strategically woven throughout, creating what could only be described as a living, breathing museum. “It was a monumental effort–designing a full-size exhibit, having it built in England then working in London for two weeks,” Chadwick says with the understatement of someone who’s survived the impossible.
His effort paid off. Chadwick & Son Orchids won the show’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Silver-Gilt medal.
Royal Flush
Opening day arrived with its usual royal fanfare—royals get exclusive access while handlers hover nearby, limiting visits to just six exhibits before ushering them along. “While King Charles III was busy looking at Japanese maples, clematis, and primroses, Queen Camilla went straight for the orchids,” says Chadwick.
And not just any orchid caught her eye—it was her own namesake, the Queen Camilla cattleya that Chadwick had bred specifically in her honor. The encounter was everything a small-town Virginia grower could hope for: “She’s a tiny little thing, but she came right up to me and shook my hand,” he recalls, describing how he showed her the poster he’d created featuring her orchid.
Despite not being on the royal’s official visitor list, Chadwick had dressed for the occasion in a seersucker suit with a yellow orchid boutonnière—because when you might meet the Queen, you dress the part.
The Virginia Magic Doesn’t End in London.
For stateside orchid enthusiasts who missed the Chelsea Flower Show spectacle, Chadwick’s bringing the show home. “Representatives from the Philadelphia Flower Show saw our exhibit and asked us to duplicate it at their February 2026 event,” he says. Mark your calendars for February 28–March 8, 2026, when a recreation of Chadwick’s award-winning Chelsea exhibition blooms again in Philadelphia. ChadwickOrchids.com
