Rotherham duo land Chelsea garden spot
- Lee and Lewis Nuttall of CGM Landscapes Yorkshire are on site at RHS Chelsea 2026, helping Dan Flynn build the Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space Garden. - The father-and-son team earned the Chelsea role after a Silver-Gilt-winning build at Wentworth Woodhouse, where Flynn spotted their work on a South Korean garden. - It matters because the Chelsea garden will later be rebuilt in Rotherham, giving a local NHS respiratory site a national-showpiece legacy.
A landscaping job in London does not usually count as local news in Rotherham. But this one does — because the garden being built at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is tied back to a respiratory health site in the town, and because the team helping build it is a father-and-son business from Thorpe Hesley. Lee and Lewis Nuttall of CGM Landscapes Yorkshire are now working at Chelsea with show veteran Dan Flynn on the Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space Garden, ahead of the 2026 show running May 19 to 23. ### Who are the duo? They are Lee and Lewis Nuttall, a father-and-son landscaping team behind CGM Landscapes Yorkshire. Local coverage places the firm in Thorpe Hesley, near Rotherham, and frames this Chelsea job as the pair’s second big RHS break rather than a first lucky call-up. short version is that they impressed the right person by doing the hard bit well. Last year, CGM built a South Korean entry at the first RHS show staged at Wentworth Woodhouse. That garden — the Hyundai E&C and Sungkyunkwan University build — won Silver-Gilt, and Dan Flynn noticed. He then brought the Nuttalls in for Chelsea 2026. ### What are they building now? They are helping construct the Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space Garden, one of 13 gardens on Chelsea’s Main Avenue. That matters because Main Avenue is the high-visibility strip — basically the show’s center stage. This is not a side display tucked into a corner. It is one of the builds most visitors, judges, and sponsors will see first. ### Why this garden in particular? The garden has a health brief, not just a design brief. It is meant as a restorative space for people living with lung conditions, with accessible paths and planting chosen to support calm and reflection. Asthma + Lung UK is the charity partner, and the whole idea lines up neatly with BreathingSpace — The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust’s specialist site for respiratory care. ### Why is Dan Flynn such a big link here? Because Flynn is not just another contractor. He is described as a landscape construction expert with 35 years of experience and nearly 30 years of Chelsea work behind him. So when someone like that asks a local firm to join a Main Avenue build, it reads as a serious vote of confidence — the gardening-world version of getting picked by a veteran coach for the big stage. ### Does the story end in London? No — and that is the part that gives the story real weight. After Chelsea, the garden is due to be rebuilt in Rotherham for BreathingSpace. Flynn and CGM are set to work on that relocation together, which means the show garden is not just a five-day showcase. It becomes a permanent local asset tied to respiratory care. ### Why does that make this more than a nice human-interest piece? Because Chelsea is usually where prestige lives for a week and then moves on. Here, national exposure feeds directly into a local legacy project. The Nuttalls get one of the biggest shop windows in horticulture, Dan Flynn gets trusted build support, and Rotherham gets a garden with a clear health purpose at the end of it. ### Bottom line? This is a career step for Lee and Lewis Nuttall, but it is also a pipeline story — local craftsmanship moving onto Chelsea’s main stage and then back home again in a form people in Rotherham will actually use.
