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Prince Harry's gardener accused of 'betrayal' after using AI to design Chelsea Flower Show plot

Prince Harry's designer Matt Keightly deploys green-fingered 'bot to help knock up garden at prestigious show - sending fellow flower-fans into a fury

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(Image: Getty Images)

A Royal gardening guru has been accused of blooming betrayal - after using AI to draw up his Chelsea Flower Show plot.

Award-winning Matt Keightley - who has created displays for Prince Harry - is deploying a bot to design his garden for next weeks prestigious west London show.

He is launching a new app called Spacelift which reportedly replicates the work of garden designers and creates spaces from scratch.

Keightley said: We're used to using technology to design every part of our homes - except our gardens. Spacelift changes that.

It gives people a starting point, a plan and the confidence to actually create something - not just imagine it.

But the move has got fellow horticulturalists in a huff, fearing the bush bot could put them out of work.

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The King smelling a 'Highgrove' rose during a visit to the 2009 Chelsea Flower Show (Image: Getty Images)

Andrew Duff, chair of the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers, said floral design was an art form.

It is rooted in creativity, collaboration, experience and human connection, he said.

While technology may offer useful tools it cannot replicate the insight, empathy and personal engagement that comes from working with a skilled garden designer to create a living, evolving natural space within the home.

Yvonne Price, a garden designer who has exhibited at RHS Hampton Court, said Chelsea should not be giving the bot a platform, adding it feels like a betrayal.

Award-winning designer Nadine Mansfield said: What time does the jobcentre open?"

Some gardeners already use AI to tell them when to water plants or to map which species might be appropriate as the climate changes.

Chelsea gold medallist Tom Massey has worked with it before - but never to design his gardens.

At last year's show he created a garden where visitors could listen to urban trees with sensors monitoring growth, sap flow, soil conditions, air quality and weather patterns.

AI was used to track the data and spot patterns and problems.

But Massey said that was completely different from automating the process.

I don't think we will see robot designers going out there doing surveys and designing gardens, he said.

I don't think many people would like the idea of that. I am worried about it.

I am worried what it will do to the industry. You could give an AI all my designs and it could produce something very similar to that.

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Blooming fury over AI designing gardens

He said a garden designed by bot would be inferior because it doesn't have that physical body and interaction with a natural space that I think you need.

Three full-size gardens designed entirely using Spacelift will be exhibited at Chelsea - a rural-inspired scheme using reclaimed materials, a compact urban balcony garden and a woodland wellbeing space with a sauna and cold shower.

Spacelift disagreed the app could put garden designers out of a job.

Head of PR and partnerships Alexandra Davison said: The platform is designed to serve the vast majority of UK homeowners who are currently priced out of professional garden design entirely.

It doesn't compete with designers, it expands the market. Spacelift users who go on to invest in their gardens are better informed, arrive with clearer briefs and more realistic expectations, which benefits the entire profession.

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