Digital roots: how smart tech could shape the the future of green cities

At this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, amid the petals and precision of the UK’s finest horticulture, something quietly radical took root. Nestled among traditional blooms was the “Avanade Intelligent Garden,” a collaborative creation between garden designer Tom Massey, Microsoft and Global technology consultancy Avanade. But this wasn’t just a spectacle — it was a prototype for the cities of the future.

For Avanade, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show might not seem the most obvious venue. As a global technology consultancy focused on data and AI solutions, their usual canvas is the enterprise IT landscape, not urban plantings. But as Hannah Clutton, Sustainability and AI Consultant at Avanade, explains, “Our mission is to do what matters. As we approached our 25th anniversary, and Microsoft its 50th, we wanted to showcase how technology could contribute to solving real-world ecological challenges.”

The seed of an idea

The idea originated from previous work with SSE Renewables, where AI was utilised to monitor puffin populations using video analytics. That ecological success, paired with Tom Massey’s stark statistic — that nearly 30 per cent of urban trees don’t survive their first year — sparked a conversation. Could technology help city trees thrive, rather than survive?

Eighteen months later, the Intelligent Garden at Chelsea was born, outfitted with an array of sensors and AI tools to monitor tree health, track pollinator activity, and gather real-time environmental data. The goal was not just technological novelty, but actionable insight.

Sensors in the soil, stories in the canopy

The garden’s technological foundation was impressively comprehensive. “Each tree had a sensor inserted directly into its trunk,” Clutton says. These monitored internal humidity, temperature, lean angle, and growth at the micrometer scale. Complementing these were custom-built GEM sensors tracking soil moisture, pH, air pollution, and temperature. Data was relayed every 20 minutes to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.

But raw data alone doesn’t create insight. The project’s second innovation, “Tree Talk,” transformed that data into meaningful narrative. Using generative AI—similar to how ChatGPT works, but trained on a focused dataset including sources like the RHS database and the Met Office rather than the entire internet—visitors could ask natural language questions such as “How are you feeling today?” and receive thoughtful, data-driven responses from the trees themselves.

Meanwhile, pollinator sensors — small cameras powered by AI models — tracked bee visits by recognising when a pollinator and flower occupied the same visual space. Though early-stage, the vision is clear: AI that can provide insights on the biodiversity pulse of a city.

From garden plot to urban blueprint

Clutton and her colleagues see two primary applications. First, a real-time dashboard for city managers. “If we can alert councils to stress in tree stock before it’s visible, we improve survival rates, reduce costs, and increase urban canopy cover, which directly supports climate resilience,” she says. Data could guide irrigation, species choice, and intervention timing, creating greener, healthier streetscapes.

Second, and perhaps more transformative, is the potential for public engagement. “The technology can inform and help citizens understand and connect with urban nature,” Clutton adds. When deployed across a city, the data tells a story — a way to share progress toward sustainability goals, build transparency, and support policies aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Justice Principles. In this role, the tech becomes more than a maintenance tool — it’s a policy accelerator.

Ownership and openness

Of course, turning trees into storytellers and cities into dashboards raises questions about data privacy and governance. Here again, two layers emerge. “If it’s about maintenance, the data might stay internal, helping grounds teams do their jobs,” Clutton explains. “But if it’s part of civic engagement, the data needs to be shared. And that raises questions: Who owns the data? Who decides what’s made public?”

There’s no clear answer yet. Clutton points out that while tree data isn’t personal in the GDPR sense, the idea of ‘public tree rights’ is still untested. “Should citizens have a right to know if their city’s trees are suffering?” she asks. It’s a philosophical shift as much as a technical one.

Paying for the forest of the future

Then comes the challenge of funding. Outfitting a city with AI-enhanced sensors is not cheap. “The capital costs are high,” Clutton admits. “But the long-term benefits — ecological, financial, societal — are even higher.”

In our discussion, we theorised a new model: could it be possible to treat urban greening infrastructure like digital infrastructure? Instead of an upfront investment, could cities pay a monthly service fee, allowing technology providers and investors to shoulder the initial costs in exchange for long-term returns? This model could unlock scale, especially if backed by public-private-philanthropic partnerships.

AI and the art of gardening

Despite initial scepticism — Clutton notes some in the horticultural community initially worried about AI replacing human wisdom — the public response at Chelsea was overwhelmingly positive. “People got it,” she says. “They wanted to understand their trees. They wanted a version for their garden. And many told me they’d lost trees themselves and wished they’d had this information.”

The garden will now move to Mayfield Park in Manchester, where the system will be tested in a real-world urban setting. If it succeeds, it may help prove a critical point: that the future of green cities may depend not on choosing between tradition and technology, but on finding harmony between them.

This is not about replacing gardeners. It’s about empowering them. It’s not about digitising for its own sake, but about equipping cities with tools that build resilience, transparency, and connection. If our cities are to become truly green — environmentally, socially, and economically — we must carry their citizens with us.

And what better way than by letting the trees speak for themselves?

By Tim Edwards, Horticultural Consultant. Originally published in the June 2025 edition of FloraCulture International.