Blooming marvellous
WHAT a joy to have the Chelsea Flower Show back in full glory (page 122). Simply being there reminded us of what we had missed during lockdown and the palpable pleasure of exhibitors at being back went far beyond business interest. This is a vibrant living institution that has more than survived the pandemic and was made particularly memorable by The Queen’s jubilee and her visit.
Chelsea commands the support of stalwart exhibitors and many have returned reinvigorated. Taylors Bulbs, premier daffodil grower, has a new show team that excelled itself with a superb display, gaining a 27th Gold medal. Hamish Mackie presented his sculptures with his usual verve. Newcomers such as Francesca Sanders were witness to the show’s enduring attraction to the young and the presence of so many visitors from all over the world showed its global pulling power.
There was joy not only in the sights, but in the heady scents of flowers and shrubs, as well as that special new-wood smell, notably in Woodpecker Joinery’s traditional glasshouse, where it provided a fitting accompaniment to this fine example of quality English workmanship. When it came to flowers, at one end of the scale was the impressive Vanda Platinum Jubilee orchid, at the other a tiny foxglove from The Botanic Nursery & Gardens, a small business in Wiltshire specialising in cottagegarden flowers and typical of the enthusiast growers who make Chelsea so special.
Enthusiasm also characterises so many of the visitors that throng the Royal Hospital gardens. This is a place not only for the famous names who fill the media slots, but for all those men and women whose lives are enriched by the plants they grow, sometimes in the smallest of patches. This year, many were struck by the sanctuary and the balcony gardens, reminders of how much can be done in a small space.
However, it was clear that many found the bigger gardens less appealing. The RHS’S very proper desire to recover Britain’s biodiversity and recognise the importance of wild places has led designers to overdo the cow parsley and the grasses. There was a fashionable sameness about what is characterised as rewilding, but is actually just as ‘artificial’ as the most conventional of arrangements.
It was, however, good to see less of the minimalism and fewer of the hard surfaces that we have had in recent years. The judges still need to remember that Chelsea is a place for contrasting attitudes to the garden, for the intricate as well as the wild, the exotic as well as the cottage—a place for every taste. Prevailing fashion must not prevail here to the exclusion of that variety.
Yet, Chelsea is also a place of temptation. Those wonderful Mediterranean pots and planters; beautifully crafted garden furniture; shepherd’s huts and romantic sheds; pavilions, pagodas and glasshouses—we all can dream! Of course, there are the horrors—the outdoor furniture that would be more at home on an oligarch’s yacht and the bulbous constructions that seem designed to shield humans from the natural world—but also the whimsical and the humorous. This year, it was Robert James that scooped the pool. The company’s re-creations of literary characters in bronze are simply enchanting. Alice, the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen, as well as so many of Beatrix Potter’s children’s favourites, have a quality and integrity that would add to any garden,great or small. They make you feel that the world is, after all, a wondrous place.
Judges still need to remember that Chelsea is a place for contrasting attitudes