THE GLORY OF THE GARDEN
Penelope Lively on her enduring love for the Chelsea Flower Show
My problem with visits to the Chelsea Flower Show used to be trying to drag my husband away from the exhibitions of lawnmowers. The difference between men and women, so far as I am concerned, is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not. And Chelsea is cunning: it knows how to cater for everyone. Never mind the lawnmowers, there will be an enticing display of every imaginable item of garden equipment, and that is before you even get going on the plants. When it comes to those, whether it is cacti, pitcher plants, acers or delphiniums that excite you, there will be the choicest possible specimens on view.
Diversity. So much, too much. Many Chelsea visitors look slightly manic, and with good reason. The wise strategy is to have a plan: the absolutely essential targets, the secondary ones, and then a few more objectives given the time and the energy. I don’t think we ever achieved that, already manic after a stand-off about the lawnmowers. Today, I am too old for Chelsea – wouldn’t be up to the walking or the standing – but I still have excellent access, thanks to television. Better access, indeed, I often think. In the past, I don’t remember managing to see more of any of the show gardens than the back view of the ranks of people in front of me. On television, you do leisurely tours of each – plenty of opportunity to admire or reject. And there can be rejection: for me, all those gardens that are more about materials than planting. Slabs of steel, concrete pillars, an acreage of decking, that rusty iron pergola; garden designers are in frenetic competition, chasing the innovative idea that may make all the difference between Gold and Silver-gilt. There are awards for everything, it can seem, and you get rather too much of that on television – the mortified contender with a Bronze, who may as well slink off home
in shame. Most visitors don’t give a fig who gets what, I suspect, but simply want to have a good look at as much as possible and make their own judgements.
And many of the show gardens will be delectable, prompting an onset of garden envy, garden aspiration, an urge to rush home, junk everything and start all over again. My daughter, who is a more knowledgeable horticulturalist than I am, is shrewd about this; she points out that the exquisitely planted space you are admiring is created for now, today, this week – it is not going to look like this at other times, in other seasons. The perfection is not quite what it seems. All the same, much of the point of a Chelsea visit is discovery – a design idea, that amazing hellebore you had never seen before, the clematis that would be exactly right up an old apple-tree.
The Floral Marquees are where most of the discoveries are made. Every plant you’ve ever heard of and plenty you haven’t; specialist nurseries, each with its own carefully crafted display. I have the greatest respect for people who have devoted their life to the cultivation of the dahlia, the iris, the penstemon… Theirs is a dedication that affects gardens everywhere; many of us have a treasured rose (or whatever) that is the outcome of years of someone’s patient expertise. And Chelsea is the showcase for all this single-minded industry, a superb assembly of the very best of every plant, a blaze of colour, a demonstration of variety – you wonder how there can be so many wildly differing forms of flower and foliage. And, inevitably, you will be blown away by something: simply must have one of those.
‘Life in the Garden’ by Penelope Lively (£9.99, Fig Tree) is out now in paperback.