A soft spot for planting nostalgia

HOMEGROWN STYLE REASSURING AND RUSTIC, CHELSEA WAS IN TUNE WITH NATURE

It was a low-key Chelsea, quietly celebrating the nation’s mood with soft-coloured native plants, inspired by William Robinson, John Clare and Wordsworth, with shepherds’ huts and vintage caravans creating a pastoral theme repeated throughout the show gardens, artisan plots and planting on commercial stands. Even the Big Issue seller at the gate remarked that there were fewer stars, and the salesperson offering champagne might have been more appropriately pouring us an elderflower cordial or a nice cup of tea. There were no riotous colours, no “bling” distractions, just slightly nostalgic, reassuring and almost rustic planting. I’m not a fan of Chelsea design features, preferring the plants, which this year were familiar and lovely. In some medal-winning gardens, like Andy Sturgeon’s design for M& G, the soft woodland edge planting, backed with plain monolithic walls and clipped yew hedging, contrasted with the clumps of billowing perennials in pale pink, white and yellow. The plant list (with its common names included) read like a calming litany: sweet rocket, ragged robin, loosestrife, sweet cicely and milk parsley. Arne Maynard’s deliciously aromatic and romantic Laurent Perrier garden used stalwarts like opium poppies ( Papaver somniferum ‘Black Paeony’), geranium phaeum, wild strawberries, maroon cornflowers ‘Black Ball’ and ‘Jordy’, and foxgloves to produce a colour palette of burgundy, pink and pale cream in a garden peopled with clipped topiary, contained by pleached copper beech and fronted by a venerable pruned pear tree. Thomas Hoblyn’s design for Arthritis Concern, inspired by Italian renaissance