Plant that can cause ‘pain like childbirth’ given nod at Chelsea
Advice for gardeners to use drought-tolerant flora comes with a potential sting in the tail
CHELSEA Flower Show has encouraged gardeners to use a drought-tolerant plant which releases a sap that can cause pain “approximate to childbirth”.
Euphorbia is one of 10 drought-tolerant plants used in the show gardens, which the RHS recommends its visitors consider planting at home.
The guide to this year’s show says euphorbia myrsinites, also known as spurge, preserves moisture well, and can help future-proof gardens as “our summers are getting hotter and drier”.
Euphorbia, often considered a weed in British gardens, is also listed by the RHS as a potentially harmful garden plant because of its toxic sap.
The pain from a spurge inflammation in the eye was likened to that of childbirth by Robin Lane Fox, the Financial Times gardening columnist, who said the plants were banned in his garden.
An RHS spokesman said: “All plants should be handled with care unless they are known not to cause irritation.
“All parts of euphorbia plants may cause severe discomfort if ingested and the contact with the sap may irritate the skin or eyes.
“The RHS advise people wear gloves and other protective equipment when handling, especially when pruning.”
Drought-tolerant planting is one of several ways the RHS is encouraging more sustainable gardening at the Chelsea Flower Show, which opens to the public tomorrow.
Applicants have had to prove they have good environmental credentials to be considered for the competition.
Environmental impact is to form part of the show’s official judging criteria, although plans to introduce the new standards this year were pushed back.
A third of the show gardens are using rubble, including one by homeless charity Centrepoint, which recreates a demolished house.
Seyi Obakin, the chief executive of Centrepoint, has said that the garden “may not be pretty but neither is youth homelessness”.
Sarah Price, a designer, has used bricks, surfaces, and planters created from waste-based castings and paths made from graded demolition waste and broken terracotta in her Nurture Landscapes Garden.
Mark Gregory, the RHS ambassador for landscaping, said it was important that Chelsea did not lose its professionalism in its sustainability drive.
He said: “I wouldn’t want the whole show to become make-do-and-mend. Because this is the greatest flower show in the world. This is a lighter footprint.
It’s not carbon zero. It never will be.” Mr Gregory has designed a garden for estate agent Savills at the show which uses reclaimed brick and cement-free concrete. He has removed single-use plastic from his design.
He added: “I will not go back to using cement on a show garden ever again. That’s done. I’m from a generation that was sustainable and we’ve become lazy, and it’s a throwaway culture.”
Four of the 12 show gardens will also use weeds, including dandelions and brambles which the RHS has said should be rebranded as “hero plants”, because of their resilience in hotter summers, and benefits for pollinators.
Among them is Jilayne Rickards’ Fauna and Flora International Garden, which uses stinging nettle, thistle, sticky grass and bramble.
As part of its green drive, the RHS is to award gardens that display “environmental innovation” at the Chelsea Flower Show in the future.
It comes as the organisation looks to boost the green credentials of the show, which has faced criticism in the past over its sustainability credentials.
Gardens are constructed from scratch on the site and taken down at
‘All parts of euphorbia can cause severe discomfort if ingested and the sap may irritate the skin and eyes’
the end of the week and in the past have often used substantial amounts of concrete and single-use plastic.
Sustainability was part of the application process for the first time at the flower show this year, with gardeners having to specify how the materials would be reused after it ended.
Organisers had also trialled using environmental credentials as part of the judging criteria. Sarah Poll, RHS head of shows development, said: “Rather than introducing sustainability as part of the judging criteria the RHS has instead introduced this at the garden selection stage. This means that we will only accept gardens at RHS Shows with good environmental credentials.
“At application stage all gardens need to have a plan in place on how the garden will live on either in full or in parts after the show.
“Designers are also asked to provide details on how they plan to make their gardens sustainable; from the materials they will use to where the plants will be sourced.”
She added: “In the future we hope to develop a special award for gardens that show such environmental innovation.”
Earlier this month, Alan Titchmarsh, RHS vice-president and TV presenter, warned about the danger of “pandering to current trends” after a rewilding garden was given best in show last year.
‘God almighty first planted a garden: and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures,” wrote Francis Bacon in his 1625 essay, Of Gardens. But discord was one of the first fruits of the Garden of Eden, and it has flourished ever since – not least at that grandest of horticultural events, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
The 2023 show opens this week in a ferment of vegetative vexation, with arguments raging over once ubiquitous terms such as “weeds” (now renamed “resilient plants”) and pests (“garden visitors”). The very soul of gardening is up for debate, with traditional methods criticised for a lack of environmental awareness. Meanwhile Manoj Malde, the RHS ambassador for diversity and inclusion, has launched a broadside at the “doublebarrel-named designers” previously featured.
The emphasis on inclusion is a striking volte-face from the Chelsea I encountered when I joined the RHS, soon after acquiring my first garden: a long, thin plot in south-east London.
I dutifully attended the show in search of inspiration, but soon realised it wasn’t meant for gardeners like me. Impossibly grand and distinctly snobbish, it was more alienating than alluring.
Around the time I relinquished my RHS membership, the garden writer Anna Pavord wrote in an essay on Chelsea: “The ruling body of the RHS has always been a bizarre coalition of nobs and nurserymen.”
Having recently become the custodian of a handsome middle-sized garden, I rejoined the RHS last year, to find the nobs and nurserymen in disorderly retreat, put to flight by the forces of diversity and sustainability.
In some ways I feel less out of place than I did during my previous membership. But it is odd to find one kind of exclusion replaced with another – this time in the name of inclusion. As the ideological arguments rage, it is hard not to wonder whether the protagonists have any interest in garden history.
A fleeting examination of the practices of past centuries shows that gardening in harmony with nature is not a revolutionary philosophy, but one that has been there all along.
Francis Bacon, in his grand design for a “stately arched hedge” incorporating turrets of caged birds, devotes a third of his plot to “a heath … framed as much as may be to a natural wildness”. Of the 18th century gardener William Kent, Horace Walpole said: “He leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.” And in 1870 William Robinson, who created a garden of wild and cultivated plants at Gravetye Manor in Sussex, published The Wild Garden.
All these great gardeners took a pragmatic approach to cultivating a natural landscape. And far from the culture wars of Chelsea, the spirit of common sense still prevails in ordinary gardens.
We may tweak our practice when it seems sensible: I weed my vegetable patch assiduously and discourage my slimier garden visitors with protective barriers of wool pellets. But the brilliant yellow buttercup, self-sown between a violet blue clematis and a coral geum, is in no danger of being pulled up.
These are anxious times, to which gardening should be an antidote rather than an irritant: a good moment for the Chelsea Flower Show to remember its real purpose – the joyful celebration of Bacon’s “purest of human pleasures”.
READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion