Chelsea panders to green lobby, says Titchmarsh
‘Fixation’ on rewilding shows festival has lost touch with its roots
ALAN TITCHMARSH has accused Chelsea Flower Show judges of pandering to environmentalists who are fixated on rewilding.
The gardener and broadcaster said the aim of the Royal Horticultural Society’s (RHS) main event, to reward gardening excellence, was being “obscured” by the need to show that gardeners are not “dyed-in-thewool traditionalists” but “vibrant folk with a finger on the current environmentalist pulse”.
Titchmarsh, who is a vicepresident of the RHS, urged judges not to give another rewilding garden the best in show prize, an act he said was tantamount to horticulture “shooting itself in the foot”.
Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt’s beaver-themed A Rewilding Britain Landscape won the title at Chelsea last year but Titchmarsh said it had shown “no sign of gardening”.
The garden featured a beaver dam, a pool with a lodge behind it, a shabby shed with a corrugated iron roof and plants native to the UK.
Monty Don, the gardener and BBC presenter, raised doubts at the time about whether the entry could be considered a garden at all.
Speaking during the BBC’S coverage of Chelsea Flower Show, he said: “The question it raises to me is … ‘Rewilding Britain’ was beautifully done, but was it a garden?”
He added: “It is a show garden and it has a right to win. Whether it is a real garden or not I’m not sure.”
Joe Swift, Don’s Gardeners World co-presenter, agreed: “To me it’s a landscape, a recreation, but just bringing it to Chelsea technically turns it into a garden.”
Writing in Country Life magazine, published yesterday, Titchmarsh, 74, said he worries “about the dangers of pandering to current trends and allowing gardening to become predicated on a kind of laissez-faire attitude to plants that eschews any kind of human interference under the assumption that Nature is best left to herself and any muscling in on our part is to be deplored.
“Gardening is, by its very nature, intervention,” he added. “But intervention intent on enabling plants to grow well and produce a scent that we find uplifting.”
Titchmarsh claimed last year’s winning show displayed “no signs of gardening, except that it had been created by gardeners”.
The RHS, which pioneered the use of chemicals to maximise production and for decades has stood for orderly gardens, now takes a more relaxed approach, including calls for gardeners to reduce their reliance on pesticides.
A senior curator at the RHS last month claimed gardening had become “too aggressive” and said people should be free to enjoy neat lawns without criticism from rewilding advocates. Conservationists have argued that manicured lawns are bad for biodiversity and water use.
However, Matthew Pottage, the head curator at RHS Wisley, said: “If somebody wants to mow their lawn and have bedding plants, and they’re getting enjoyment out of gardening, brilliant, let them do it.”