Preview of Chelsea Flower Show
PK4real
By Valerie Grove
Our correspondent enjoys a stroll through the Royal Hospital as finishing touches are put on the Chelsea Flower Show
THERE are few pastimes the British enjoy more than strolling in gardens. Plant envy, fuelled by garden makeover television programmes has joined property envy as a national characteristic, and the Chelsea Flower Show is the apogee of the nation’s horticultural lust.
But the unspoken message at yesterday’s preview was Kipling’s admonition that, “Gardens are not made/By singing, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade”.
Far from it. The exhibitors were pruning and dead-heading, laying turf, stacking rocks, shovelling and banking mountains of compost and bark chips to ensure that every single blade of lavender, every leaf was in perfect condition to receive the Princess Royal on Monday, followed by the general public next week.
The weather was thoroughly English and garden-friendly: a torrential downpour followed by sparkling sunshine with breezy gusts of wind. Delicate roses remained wrapped in brown paper cones marked “Benjamin Britten”, “Shropshire Lad”, “Gentle Hermione”.
Goaded by television gardeners, people yearn for visual effects — a fancy summerhouse, an ornate bench, a log cabin, a sundial — and at Chelsea there are fantastical examples, some of which might look excessive in one’s suburban domestic plot. Redwood Stone of Somerset, for example, has erected a folly resembling the ruins of Fountains Abbey, in Ripon, North Yorkshire.
And most spectacular of all, a rainforest garden laden with strange bulbous fruits, in the Eden Project’s display, to illustrate the dangers of climate change. Kingcombe Aquacare, from Hooke, Dorset, have built an eye-catching Malaysian house on stilts in a pond surrounded by exotic tropical flowers flown over from Johor, Malaysia. Most of us have gardens, but that does not make us gardeners; the appeal of Chelsea is being able to talk to people who really know their stuff. Visitors will find a whole clan of Perrys, representing the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens, displaying some of the rare plants found by their grandfather, Amos Perry, and raised at Enfield between 1896 and 1945. They will give you a list of 63 plants that have been lost completely, from Amaryllis belladonna “Hathor” to Strepthanthea cuprea.
Julian Barrow, the painter, stood with easel and palette, painting the scene at the Chelsea Pensioners’ garden, which boasted a thatched cottage pub under a pink horse chestnut tree — an English cottage garden filled with cow parsley and complete with cabbage patch.
And for fans of television gardening there was Diarmuid Gavin, showing off the garden he has made to suit a block of flats, designed to be seen from windows several storeys above: it is composed entirely of lavender and box, with white concrete spheres inside which flat-dwellers can sit and relax or work at their computers.
He was inspired, he said, by having bought a flat in Dublin, backing on to the Botanic Gardens. The developers had made a garden of rose beds and gravel, “and nobody ever uses it,” he said. “This is meant to show what can be done in front of any apartment block.”
GARDEN GOSSIP
WITH just over 48 hours to go until the grand opening of the Chelsea Flower Show the organisers were fretting last night over whether the first day would be televised. Thousands of BBC staff are expected to go on strike on Monday in protest at job losses
Diarmuid Gavin, the BBC presenter and “bad boy of gardening”, thinks that “there will probably be one show instead of three on Monday but I don’t mind”. He’s too busy learning to love Chelsea again after his spat with fellow competitor Bunny Guinness last year. He accused her of “snobbery, elitism and rudeness” after she criticised the height of his garden walls. In return, Guinness said he was “a nasty piece of work”. This time Gavin’s lavender-covered communal garden borders Sir Terence Conran’s entry. The Dubliner said: “We haven’t got narky neighbours this year.”
Last year’s champion designer, Christopher Bradley-Hole, is an early favourite again with a modern “grove” designed as a tribute to his regular collaborator, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, former President of the United Arab Emirates.