It’s that depressing flower show again, full of forced plants and taking over the television schedules
Have you been to the Chelsea Flower Show this year? Did you find it a little bit depressing? I thought so. For me, it’s like New Year’s Eve — every year I feel I should go and have fun, and every year, almost without fail, it’s a disappointment.
The biggest problem is the crowds. They make the struggle around the show ground a test of stamina and ingenuity. Whenever I hear someone say ‘I just love people-watching’, I suggest they visit the flower show’s loudly trumpeted gardens on Main Avenue. That’ll soon cure them.
The RHS have done their best to relieve the problem, by limiting timed-entry ticket sales, extending the show by a day, and all of that, but the beast just keeps growing. To raise the mountains of beans necessary to feed it, there are champagne breakfasts and Tuesday evening has been revved up into the ‘Gala Preview’. Tickets change hands at up to 750 quid a head. The word gala is bad enough, unless it’s an apple, but in this case, it means a grander version of people-watching. Ringo Starr if you’re lucky. High heels get stuck in the mud and the gardens are largely ignored.
The media’s obsession with Chelsea began weeks ago. Previews in the press of the ‘must see’ attractions gave the game away with their eerie CGI mock-ups of the gardens that would and will never look like that in real life. I love Alan Titchmarsh; he’s an assured presenter and an expert, unlike most of the others who are either one thing or the other, or good-looking — but I do feel for them all, casting about for hyperbole. Everything has to be sumptuous or gorgeous. Yeah, yeah, we all love plants but the Chelsea Flower Show is not Wimbledon. There is no need for daily updates.
The truth is that any magic the Chelsea Flower Show does have disappears as soon as the gates open to the public. It’s the build-up which is the real draw. Diggers, forklift trucks, groups of contractors, designers, plantsmen, hanging around in concerned conference, borrowing and lending tools, smoking rollies. As the hard elements of the gardens begin to take shape, lorry loads of immaculate plants arrive and at the close of the day and if the sun appears, Chelsea comes into its own. The majestic avenue of London planes casts its shadows across the grounds and horticultural types — usually reclusive for the rest of the year — all huddle and chatter and peer at what everyone else is up to.
The only thing the RHS, via the BBC, doesn’t tell us is that Chelsea is very un-green. There is huge wastage, as vast amounts of contingency plants have to be grown and only the best selected for exhibition. Many plants are specially, expensively, forced on or held back, because the show takes place at an awkward stage of the growing year. I found all this out a few years ago when I showed a small garden there.
I did miss being part of the build-up this year, but I didn’t eschew flower shows altogether. I went instead to ‘Les Journées des Plantes à Courson’, in the beautiful parkland of the château of the same name, just south of Paris. It is a small and exquisite show in its 30th year or so, each spring and autumn, Plant fashion week, I guess. Of course the froggies rinsed me in much the same way as the traders at Chelsea would have done, but they did it in French. In this country, newly bred plants are ‘launched’ at Chelsea to commemorate the likes of Liz Taylor, or maybe Liz Windsor this year, but in France, they receive ‘un baptême’, so how could I resist? I ditched my return ticket on Eurostar and hired a van to get all the goodies back: not just plants, but embossed vases from Anduze, heavy linen Breton gardening pinnies, and beautifully crafted tools far too good to use. A few of the pots got smashed on the ferry home, but the ones that survived will remind me every year to leave Chelsea behind and head for France.
Tiggy Salt (tiggysalt@mac.com) is a garden designer. She won a silver medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2007.