How Leon Kluge, SA’s unofficial ambassador for Cape flora, struck gold at Chelsea for the third time
Listen here
To get Cape fynbos and proteas ready for the Chelsea Flower Show after wildfire one year and drenching rain the next is no small feat. But Leon Kluge, South Africa’s plant guru and master designer, has done it again. This year he returned from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in London, the world’s most prestigious floral showcase, with not only a Gold medal but also the coveted Best Exhibit in the Great Pavilion for Life After Fire. The display, one of South Africa’s largest ever at Chelsea, featured 20,000 stems, thousands of burnt protea branches and even blooms from the Drakensberg. In an interview with BizNews, Kluge describes the hurdles he and artist Tristan Woudberg faced, from hostile weather to the soaring cost of flights. South Africans will be able to see the exhibition in September in Stanford in the Overberg, an event dedicated to the community and the flower pickers who helped make it possible. Kluge says South Africa’s natural spaces are becoming fewer and more fragile, and that he sees it as his responsibility to tell the story of an ecosystem that is both uniquely vulnerable and admired around the world. – Linda van Tilburg
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. Register here.
Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.
If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.
Edited transcript of the interview
Linda van Tilburg (00:01)
Leon Kluge, South Africa's plant guru and master designer, has done it again at the 2026 RHS Chelsea Flower Show in London. He and the South African team have won Gold with Life After Fire, one of the country's biggest displays at the show. Leon, welcome back. Always a pleasure to have you.
Leon Kluge (00:21)
Thank you so much. Yes, it's nice to be back in South Africa now.
Linda van Tilburg (00:30)
Yes. Well, you're now repeating the success year after year. Do you now have a recipe for gold at Chelsea?
Leon Kluge (00:38)
Well, it's been a journey. I don't think there's any recipe for that. It really is about how all the little puzzle pieces come together in the end, and anything can cause a piece to get lost.
This year there were quite a few factors that almost caused us not to be at the Chelsea Flower Show, and the main one was the weather. Every year we have great weather, and it's my biggest obstacle, my biggest fear, because we can't pick any flowers if there's moisture in the air, like heavy dew, mist, rain or snow. And we had all of it at once, even wind.
At that point I was already in London, building the base structures, all the hard stuff, all the ugly things, while the farmers were meant to start picking the flowers. They kept calling me to say, “Leon, we can't pick anything. It's too stormy and too wet.” If the flowers go into the boxes wet, by the time they reach London, almost a week later, they're full of mould, black, and unusable.
So, at that point I didn't quite know what to do. We were thinking of plans B, C and D, but nothing really materialised, because you can't get these fynbos plants in Europe or in the UK. Luckily, the storm lifted for a limited amount of time, about 12 hours or so.
Linda van Tilburg (02:19)
Mm.
Leon Kluge (02:28)
Some of the areas, not all, but some, told me, “Leon, we're going to make a plan and pick some flowers. We can't guarantee everything you wanted, but if we see something else that's dry, we'll pick it for you.” And they did. They tried their best to dry everything, and we managed to get enough flowers this year for the show, which was a big relief.
The one silver lining was that, because it was so cold, rainy and even snowy in some areas, the flower quality was excellent. That was the only upside to the weather.
Linda van Tilburg (03:10)
The theme this year. Can you describe it for us?
Leon Kluge (03:33)
This year the garden I designed was called Life After Fire. I chose that theme because of all the major fires we've had, especially in the Western Cape. Fires are destructive and frightening, and we've seen properties and animal life lost.
But from a fynbos perspective, fire is necessary, provided it's balanced. It's been part of the mountains here for hundreds of thousands of years, and we live in a fire-driven ecosystem, a fire-driven paradise. Fire is part of what creates the biodiversity and explosion of plant life that makes the Western Cape so famous.
The problem is human intervention. Near cities and towns, fires can happen too often, every two to three years, so proteas don't have enough time to mature, set seed and regenerate, and they start to disappear. But if fire is suppressed for too long, then the bulbs, annuals and orchids waiting beneath the dense protea bushes, where it is dark at ground level, also begin to fade away.
So it's a balance. Too many fires and you lose proteas. Too few and you lose the other beautiful species underneath. A protea is also a remarkable protector. It holds its seeds for years, and only after fire passes through does it release them, when conditions are best for new life.
The plant sacrifices itself, and the ash enriches the poor soil in the Western Cape. There's sunlight on the ground, so those seeds have a much better chance to grow up strong. That's a very important thing to keep in mind with proteas.
Linda van Tilburg (06:42)
Can you describe the design for us?
Leon Kluge (06:55)
In terms of the design, it is a two-part garden. The first side shows the destructive force of the fire. The big proteas are burnt, leaving only skeletons and charred branches, and the edging is scorched wood. I used those harsh, burnt elements deliberately because I wanted a strong structure that pulls the eye and makes people look twice.
There is also the scent of smoke, so when you walk past the garden you smell a recent fire. Then come the bulbs, which respond very quickly in the Western Cape. Some of the earliest flowers can be in bloom just two weeks after a fire, like the fire lilies.
In my display, it is about two to three months later. The first rain has fallen, there is some moisture, the first flowers are starting to appear, and a lot of greens are coming through. There's a little stream with some moisture in it, the moss is beginning to green, and some orchids are starting to flower. I also had a little smoke drifting down the stream to create the sense that there is still a smouldering ember somewhere.
On the other side, where the garden begins to merge, it is two to four years after the fire. The proteas have grown back into their teenage phase, covering the soil again, while the bulbs, orchids and annuals begin to rest. The proteas then explode with colour and take over the landscape, as a healthy ecosystem should.
Linda van Tilburg (09:12)
You’ve become an unofficial ambassador for South Africa's flora, and your enthusiasm for it is so palpable. Does that feel like a responsibility now?
Leon Kluge (09:26)
Yes, it is a responsibility, and I take that on fully. It's a responsibility not only on the world stage, where we showcase our fynbos and tell people what we still have here, but also in promoting our cut-flower industry and green tourism.
In the long term, that can help save spaces from being developed, because once these natural places are lost, they're lost forever. Worldwide, people envy us because we still have so many wild spaces that haven't been shaped too heavily by human hands. People come from all over to see these famous flowers growing in their natural habitat.
I feel it is my responsibility to showcase them, to show how vulnerable they are, and to tell their story in a way that brings them to life, how they develop, survive, and coexist with insects, birds and amphibians.
Even what we're doing now, bringing the whole garden back to Stanford, is about raising money for the community and helping eradicate alien plants, often from Australia, from our mountains so our fynbos has breathing space.
That's important because fynbos fires normally move very fast in the Cape winds. They are hot, but brief, and they don't destroy the seed bed. But when invasive plants like eucalyptus, pine and wattle are mixed into the landscape, they make fires much hotter and longer-lasting, and that can destroy the seed bed entirely. It's a very important message to get across.
Linda van Tilburg (12:11)
You've just mentioned that the exhibition is also going home to Stanford. Tell us about the local showcase. Is that exactly what people saw at Chelsea?
Leon Kluge (12:22)
Yes. We will be opening it on 12 September in Stanford, in the same place, and I hope everybody in the community, farmers, flower pickers, schools, everyone, can come and have a look at it. It is there for people to enjoy.
We got a lot of media coverage with the display abroad, but bringing it back for South Africans is very special. It will be about 98 per cent the same, as close as I can make it.
There are one or two flowers that will be asleep then, so I'll have to find alternatives, but for the most part it will be exactly the same.
Linda van Tilburg (13:22)
There were a couple of years when funding was a real challenge. Are things more secure now?
Leon Kluge (13:30)
Funding is always a challenge, I'm not going to lie. It keeps getting more expensive. This year there were extra pressures because petrol and diesel prices went up, and flights to London were extremely expensive. In the beginning it was much harder.
But now that we've secured a name, more people are willing to support us because they understand the message we're putting out into the world. It's about the flowers and the natural spaces they belong to.
We now have some wonderful supporters, really, partners, including The Grootbos Foundation, the Rupert Nature Foundation, Hazendal Wine Estate and Southern Sun. They speak the same language as us when it comes to protecting our fynbos and natural spaces.