The flowers at the Chapel looked as if ancient stones had blossomed

Last Saturday in Kent the hedgerows looked like bridal bouquets: creamy swags of may blossom drooping above a filigree of Queen Anne’s lace. Later, watching the highlights of the royal wedding, I thought that St George’s Chapel looked like a glorious, unclipped English hedge – as though the ancient stones had burst into blossom from sheer joy.

As the Chelsea Flower Show opens this week, many of the show gardens will be echoing the natural theme. But this year I wonder if there might be a still more emphatic shift towards unkempt horticulture. Last week, on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time, a lady beset with ground elder was urged to embrace the invasive weed. Ground elder, observed the GQT chairman, Eric Robson, is really quite beautiful.

When it comes to weediculture, I seem to be unexpectedly ahead of fashion. Some years ago, a pipe-laying operative from Thames Water dug up my front garden. It would have taken a team of gardeners with heavy machinery to repair the wreckage and, since I had neither, I had to let nature take its course.

This it did with a swift invasion of ageratum and the adhesive weed, Galium aparine. But slowly a transformation took place: foxgloves, dead nettle, poppies, buttercups and wild hop self-seeded. Wrens, bees and the common blue butterfly moved in.

I don’t suppose I shall be volunteering my patch for the National Garden Scheme quite yet. But still, an effortless transition from urban wasteland to self-sown sweet disorder is definitely my kind of gardening.

My son is moving back home and already we have run into trouble over the guidelines for acceptable domestic behaviour. When I suggested that there should be a cover on the duvet, changed weekly, you’d have thought I’d insisted we tackle a book of the Aeneid each morning before breakfast.

He is not alone in finding the insertion of duvet into cover an insoluble conundrum. In a plaintive letter to the Telegraph, Mr Taylor of Purley demands to know how to change a duvet cover “in a dignified manner”. He is, he admits, so baffled by the necessary gymnastics that he is “seriously thinking of hiring a duvet-changer”.

This thought, I’m pretty sure, dwells in my son’s mind, too. Only “hiring” isn’t exactly the mot juste when you have a resident mother who sees no problem in the task (align corners of duvet within corners of cover. Shimmy like your sister Kate. All done.) Why chaps seem unable to do this, I’m sure I don’t know. I suppose it’s all in the effective – but definitely undignified – shimmy.

So now we know: Prince William’s uniform trousers were too tight. Prince Harry told his bride-to-be that she looked “amazing”, while his cousin, Zara Tindall, told her husband she needed the loo. All this according to a team of lip-readers employed to make public the banal obiter dicta of the royal wedding.

Politicians’ unguarded remarks are fair game: they constitute a rare glimpse of the real person behind the mask of spin. But chap finds his old uniform overalls a bit snug? Husband thinks bride looks beautiful. Pregnant woman needs the lav? Really?

Eavesdropping used to be a practice regarded with intense disfavour. Time, maybe, to let banality keep its secrets.