Next time you go to scrape up that unloved moss, think again, says garden designer Zoe Claymore. It could just be the start of a rainforest. Moss, of various species, is the basis for her garden at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show created for the Wildlife Trusts. It will promote the charity’s 100-year project to preserve and expand the UK’s temperate rainforest, which at one time covered 20 per cent of the land — it now covers just 1 per cent. 

They might not have the Technicolor creatures and steamy temperatures of their tropical counterparts, but temperate rainforests are similarly biomes whose lush vegetation, rich soil and high levels of biodiversity store enormous amounts of carbon — more than 1,000 tonnes per hectare. Rarer than tropical rainforests, they are found in areas of the UK, the US, Japan, New Zealand, Canada and Chile, where proximity to the sea creates mild and humid conditions. 

Claymore herself spent some of her childhood playing in one of Britain’s few spots of rainforest, in Lydford Gorge, Devon, adjoining her grandparents’ garden. “It was magical. I liked the wildness of it,” she says: it was those memories she drew on when creating the design. After taking on the Wildlife Trusts project, she revisited Lydford and other rainforest sites, including Dart Valley Reserve in Devon, for inspiration. “The consistent elements,” she discovered, were “water; stone; native trees that are a little bit wonky and a little bit odd; ferns; mosses and lichen.”