The Thomas Gainsborough Garden - RHS Sandringham Flower Show 2026
Some gardens are made to be walked through. This one is made to be looked at, the way you might look at a painting.
At the first RHS Sandringham Flower Show this July, award-winning designer Frederic Whyte unveils The Thomas Gainsborough Garden, a love letter to one of Britain's greatest landscape painters and to the Suffolk countryside that shaped him. Created in partnership with Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, the artist's birthplace, the garden takes its cues from his soft, painterly world. Think pastel pinks and yellows, naturalistic planting in greens and blues and a romantic perimeter of silver birch that echoes the loose, expressive brushwork of his canvases. At its heart, a mirror-like reflective pool catches the vast East Anglian sky, while a young mulberry stands in for the famous 400-year-old tree that still grows at Gainsborough's House.
We are proud to have supplied the stone that grounds it all. Our Buscot Limestone, tumbled and etched for a gently weathered finish, runs throughout the scheme. Buscot Klinkers are laid in a classic herringbone, their warm tones threading the paths together, while Buscot Cobbles surround the studio and frame the reflective pool. Bullnosed copings finish the steps with the kind of quiet, tactile detail that rewards a closer look. There is something fitting in that. Gainsborough painted the everyday Suffolk landscape with real tenderness, and stone with this much quiet character belongs in exactly that kind of scene. It is chosen to feel as though it has always been there, settling into the landscape rather than sitting on top of it.
Meet the Designer
Frederic Whyte is a landscape designer, horticulturist and writer based in Suffolk, working across the UK and Italy. A graduate of The English Gardening School at the Chelsea Physic Garden, he is known for blending formal structure with naturalistic, painterly planting, and has gathered medals at RHS Chelsea and Hampton Court along the way, including Gold in 2013. An academic background in the humanities feeds a lifelong fascination with where literature, the visual arts and garden design meet. As Frederic puts it, the garden is "a fitting celebration of the artist's life and work" and a reminder that gardens themselves are, or should be, works of art.
The Thomas Gainsborough Garden can be seen at the RHS Sandringham Flower Show from 22 to 26 July 2026.
