How Chelsea has taken us through the keyhole
On the flower show’s final day, Harry de Quetteville has fond memories stirred by Virtual Chelsea’s magical little vignettes
Memory is so partial. It omits and intensifies. Much of last year, even, is a blur. But one night, in the garden, remains gloriously alive. A blissful summer’s evening, friends, gathered around the table, lingering in the warm and the jasmine scent until babysitters could be delayed no longer.
Yesterday, that evening came to me again, as the floral designer Shane Connolly showed me how to clip stems from his own garden and dress his own table outside. Of course, no need to explain, this was all done via video – a sometimes shaky effort when one hand clasped the cameraphone and the other the secateurs, but no matter. Here was a magical little vignette. And useful, too.
As both tech bod and garden nut, I have loved these videos (though I don’t like Monty’s earphones) on the RHS website, as part of its Virtual Chelsea programme to fill the absence of the real garden show. The way they pry into the homes and nurseries of suppliers and professionals, giving us glimpses behind the scenes we would never usually see, has combined worthy practical hints, with a lovely, through-the-keyhole nosiness.
“It might be worth getting a ladder for these beautiful Cécile Brunner,” Connolly says at one point, running the lens over a delicate pink climbing rose. “Ooh, I’ve got Cécile
Brunner,” I was thinking, with the happy eagerness of a punter hearing a number come up from their own bingo card.
It couldn’t, in truth, be less like the real Chelsea – that bunfight on the Embankment; glorious too, but elbow room only, fighting through the crowds in the Grand Pavilion, hunting down personal favourites (roses, irises, salvias) but compelled to gawp at a thousand other things, en route.
That serendipity is responsible for the profusion of pink and white nicotiana blooms now bursting forth from a shady border of our own garden, and a cluster of sedums – the Autumn Joy we knew and the Black Beauty we didn’t. And it is irreplaceable. Not that it is Chelsea’s fault, if I am tempted to scout the videos I think I will like rather than the ones I won’t. It is the internet’s perennial failing, always pushing us further down the paths we already tread, rarely to strike out on new avenues.
In the flesh it is different. Like that time my wife, nine months pregnant, struggled around in the sweltering May heat. Chelsea is exhausting at the best of times. How few places there are to sit down. A bench – and a place on it – miraculously appeared. She collapsed, only to discover the other end was occupied by Andy Sturgeon, the multi award-winning garden designer (Best Garden last year), who was filming a piece to camera. No wonder the bench was unoccupied. How charming he was. How we chatted away. How fondly my wife talks of lovely handsome
Andy Sturgeon to this day. I’m not jealous.
That day we also looked out across a sea of blooms and one caught our eye.
“How about Cosmo?” I mused aloud, thinking of baby names. Now he’s just about to turn six.
Of course, cosmos doesn’t usually burst forth until June or
July at the earliest, a reminder that even when it’s running as normal, there is still something virtual about Chelsea; all those flowers somehow blooming in May, nature’s calendar bent to the imperative of the great show.
If the charm of the RHS videos has blossomed, even from the first day (“Success with Agapanthus” was one from Monday – how did they know we were failing?), I must confess the much more slickly produced BBC coverage has ever so slightly wilted. It’s an unfair criticism. Because the Beeb’s greater resources have helped it do almost too well, somehow approximating the old format, and that approximation has sometimes highlighted the bitter contrast between this and the hubbub of other years. What terrible irony. Never, I am certain, have so many of the nation’s gardens been looking so magnificent, blessed by bountiful sun, enough rain, and unprecedented attention. Yet we sit in them alone. No hubbub of our own. No friends to gather around the table late into the evening, in the warmth and the scent of the jasmine.
Chelsea is always a little virtual; all those flowers somehow blooming in May