Tabula Rosa, Chelsea Flower Show 2025

This Humid House is honoured to make our debut at the prestigious RHS Chelsea Flower Show with Tabula Rosa, a new site-specific installation. Presented in the Creative Spaces category from 19 - 24 May 2025, the project marks the first time a studio from Asia has been invited to exhibit in this segment of the show.

Selected by invitation, Creative Spaces is Chelsea’s most open-ended category—free from the constraints of traditional show garden formats or fixed themes. It celebrates innovation in spatial and botanical expression. This year’s cohort includes New York florist Emily Thompson and the London-based duo Wagner Kreusch and Frida Kim, alongside THH.

Tabula Rosa explores the shifting role of botanical display in an era shaped by climate instability and machine-generated imagery. Named after tabula rasa (blank slate) and rosa (rose), the work reflects on how plants have historically been classified, aestheticised, and manipulated through colonial systems of knowledge. Though no roses appear, the title gestures toward the fantasies and erasures that continue to shape how nature is seen and staged.

Constructed on aluminium trusses and cinematically lit for an always camera-ready age, Tabula Rosa transforms its corner of Chelsea into a surreal landscape of botanical fictions. Through improbable pairings and disorienting shifts in scale, the installation asks how the tropics—especially as imagined in the West—have been romanticised, distorted, and reassembled.

The installation is composed of a series of interrelated pieces:

In the foreground, miniature orchids and Arisaema nepenthoides—a Himalayan species resembling a pitcher plant—emerge from rubble on slender metal stands. They are flanked by green plantains sourced from a local Ghanaian grocer, referencing the global reach of tropical produce and the colonial legacy of the banana. Overhead, a constellation of magnifying lenses hovers—evoking tools of scientific scrutiny, the colonial gaze, and the rising precarity of ecological systems.

At its centre, a grove of Musa ensete (Abyssinian banana) rises above a layered planting of temperate and subtropical species—geraniums, bromeliads, euphorbias, irises. Once a disruptive presence at Great Dixter’s Exotic Garden, the banana now serves as a climate barometer, emblematic of shifting hardiness zones. Piercing this vegetal ground is the inverted, dried inflorescence of the babassu palm, native to the Amazon—its exaggerated foxtail form intensifying the work’s surreal proportions.

Suspended above, two Acacia pravissima trees are wrapped in stitched palm husks, mimicking the glitchy textures and mismatched seams of AI-generated imagery. Nearby, a sculptural cross-section of botanical material—corkscrew hazel, bean pods, tubers, subtropical blooms—appears monolithic at first, but reveals a dense internal lattice upon closer inspection. In one corner, bougainvillaea, a familiar tropical staple, begins to creep through the structure, overtaking it from within. This element draws from the Victorian tradition of display cases–but turns the idea of containment into absurdity.

Rather than offer resolution, Tabula Rosa invites visitors into a tropical gothic: a dreamlike terrain where nature and artifice bleed into one another, and plants act not as ornament, but as agents in a speculative, entangled future