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Disney

The Lion King Anniversary Community Garden
RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2024

We're delighted to welcome you to The Lion King's Community Garden, celebrating 25 years of the West End production. On this page you'll be able discover more about our brilliant garden designer Juliet Sargeant, and the wonderful garden she has created. We are incredibly proud that the garden has received three awards at the festival: Best Show Garden, the RHS Environmental Innovation Award and a Silver Gilt Medal. We hope it will inspire you to continue celebrating the circle of life.

Learn More About the Garden

The garden is filled with vibrant, drought-tolerant flowers, to reflect the bright colours of Julie Taymor's original design, and dusty red soil has been planted with swathes of resilient grasses to reflect the Pridelands. The garden is surrounded by a wildlife-friendly dry hedge, to create a traditional Boma providing a communal meeting place for visitors to sit and reflect on their own journey through the ‘Circle of Life'.

  • •	A circle of yellow woven stools arranged outdoors on a red earth gravel surface, surrounded by thin, upright wooden poles and various plants. A red and orange, semi-circular wall evoking a sun is in the background.

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  • •	Yellow stools with black patterns are arranged in a row beside a rustic woven twig fence, surrounded by wildflowers and greenery.

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  • •	Two potted succulent plants placed on red sand, surrounded by green vegetation and twigs. The pots are tilted, suggesting a natural setting or garden.

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  • Close-up view of a garden scene featuring colorful flowers and tall green grasses, partially framed by out-of-focus tree trunks in the foreground.

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  • A garden with yellow flowers and various green plants. Trees are in the background, and the ground is covered with mulch.

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  • Close-up view of two yellow ottomans with black geometric patterns sit on gravel next to small green plants in an outdoor setting.

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  • A statue of a gazelle leaps through a green garden with thin wood branches behind, obstructing a fabric interpretation of a sunset.

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  • Thin wood branches form a short wall in front of vibrant grasses and orange flowers. Behind them is a fabric interpretation of a sunset.

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  • Green grasses and yellow flowers sit in front of a painted fabric backdrop evocative of a sunset.

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  • Green grasses and yellow flowers sit in front thin wood branches set vertically in front of a painted fabric backdrop evocative of a sunset.

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  • An extreme close-up of a spikey purple plant amid dark green grasses.

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  • An extreme close-up of soft yellow and orange flowers.

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  • An extreme close-up of an orange flower against green grasses with smaller yellow flowers in the background.

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  • A close-up of an orange flower with a dark brown centre in front of a green grasses and out of focus foliage.

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  • Garden Designer Juliet Sargeant

    When award-winning garden designer Juliet Sargeant watched The Lion King in the West End to research ideas, she was immediately struck by the production’s use of a circle motif. ‘It’s really simple but really clever, and it runs through the whole show,’ she says.

    During the course of her subsequent research, she came across traditional South African enclosures, or bomas, and the idea of putting one at the heart of her garden to celebrate 25 years of the show in London quickly took hold. She also wanted to reflect the idea of the circle of life in the ‘balance and harmony’ of the planting.

    ‘The whole process of making a show garden is a form of showmanship,’ she says. ‘With both a theatre and a garden, you’re inviting people to join you in an act of willing engagement, to take a leap of imagination and spin their own story.’ There are also structural elements in her design that directly echo the stage production, including the large sun which forms the garden’s backdrop.

    Juliet was born in Tanzania and came to England as a young child, where her passion for gardening was seeded, quite literally, in her family’s back garden in Surrey.’ I think if a child has that sort of connection to nature at the very beginning, it’s always a part of your DNA,’ she adds.

    And though the savannah may seem remote from the UK, Juliet explains that there are lots of ideas, such as the dry hedge, that visitors can incorporate into their own gardens to support our native fauna. ‘Lions are fabulous, charismatic beasts, but in the UK we have lots of fantastic wildlife we also need to look after.’ Many of the plants are drought-tolerant too, which is increasingly important as our climate heats up. ‘I want this to be a garden that everyone can enjoy,’ says Juliet, ‘a real community celebration.’

    Juliet's Top Planting Tips


    1. If you want to have successful plants, you need to start from the soil up. Feed your soil with a good dose of manure, which you need to dig in!
    2. When you're choosing your plants, choose plants that you know are going to survive in your area. So look at what your neighbours are growing and ask your local nurseries what would be good for your garden.
    3. Water your plants after you've planted them, but you won't need to water them forever. Let them get their roots down with some regular watering for the first growing season and then they’ll be away!
    4. Mulch your soil with something like bark chipping. That will seal in the moisture and also reduce the weeding that you have to do.
    5. Enjoy your gardening and watch your plants grow!

    Find Out More

    Experience Disney's landmark musical, The Lion King, at the Lyceum Theatre in London this Summer.

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