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'.

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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