QUENTIN LETTS: How Chelsea Flower Show misplaced contact with British gardens
Scrape the mud from your fingernails, the Chelsea Flower Show has started.
Those lucky enough to have tickets for this perennial of London’s social season may be anticipating a celebration of our national gardening obsession: eruptions of petticoat pinks and blues, heavenly scents, the artful establishment of some green-swarded order amid Nature’s boisterousness.
Throw in a pinch of panache by all means — a patch of fern-dotted shade, the almost edible smell of purple wisteria, walls that drip with roses — but you also need discipline and ruthlessness. Gardeners must yank out more than they plant. We sow and till and prune, and occasionally murder.
At this time of year my weekends, with intermissions for church and pub, consist of weeding, mowing, staking, spraying, edging and seldom sitting down to admire all the handiwork.
Sophie Parmenter and Dido Milne’s National Autistic Society Garden using native plants and mosses
Don’t tell the vegans but on Saturday I did a spot of ethnic cleansing, squashing scores of red and black beetles before picking our asparagus.
Under firm instruction from the head gardener (aka wife), I continued our war of attrition with ground elder and goosegrass. You know goosegrass. Its other name is sticky willy and its cleavers spread like starchy spaghetti.
Other enemies: bindweed, groundsel, hairy bittercress, creeping buttercup, marestail, nettle. They could almost be the names of parliamentary constituencies. Worst of the lot is herb robert, a geranium with disreputable tendencies. Smelly, red and straggly, its stems snap easily in your hand in order to protect its roots. When I successfully extract a clump of herb robert from the box hedge, I cackle like Vincent Price.
This toil will bring rewards in a week or so when the philadelphus blooms and its elusive, orangey scent drifts under the old apple tree. Before long the runner beans will be doffing their red Phrygian caps.
A judge speaks in front of a display of John Peace Chrysanthemums at the Chelsea Flower Show in London
The deep-purple rose under our kitchen window, Souvenir du Docteur Jamain, will fluff out her skirts. Dip your nose into her flowers and you can smell temptation itself.
‘There once was a dormouse who lived in a bed of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)’, runs an AA Milne poem. Delphiniums are dreamy but I also love hollyhocks, bearded irises, sweet peas and those tall alliums whose purple pompoms could be bass drumsticks.
These are some of our island’s summer delights. If anyone suggests emigrating to a dusty tax haven, the only retort you need is: ‘Britain’s herbaceous borders in June.’
But do today’s custodians of the Chelsea Flower Show understand this? Is Chelsea still representative of gardeners’ dreams? Or has this once magnificent rus in urbe event become bent out of shape, its root stock bastardised by cultural Leftism, corporate virtue-washing and daft theories about horticultural appropriation?
Scanning the list of this year’s entries, one is struck by the lack of colour, the scarcity of straight line, the rarity of beauty. In their stead there is political posturing about recycling and suffering, along with the messy, ‘No Mow May’ creed of rewilding.
Re-blinking-wilding! Gardening is about the tension between order and disorder. What is the point of jumping into your gardening gauntlets if you are not going to try to bend the elements to your artistic will? We all know it can only be temporary, but the aspiration to create beauty is essential, surely.
Chelsea seems to have forgotten this. So many of its garden designs extol messiness. Alan Titchmarsh has taken a pop at it all. In Country Life he has labelled Chelsea the ‘Paris catwalk’ of British gardening and has decried its ‘fads and fashions’.
As one who has never forgiven Titchmarsh for the garden-decking craze created by his 1990s TV show Ground Force, I am surprised to find myself in agreement with the little gnome. The Chelsea Flower has gone anti-bucolic. Visitors can look forward to the Bridgerton Garden which has ‘themes of mystery, turmoil and defiance; layers of groundcover, ferns and ivy… represent a woven network of secrets’.
Alan Titchmarsh (pictured last September) used to present Gardeners’ World on the BBC but he hung up his hoe in 2002
They planted ivy? Are they mad? That garden also has ‘lichens, mosses, ferns, and a number of invertebrates’. Come to Chelsea and see our snails. The Burmese Medicine Skincare Garden is full of plantain. This is ‘not a hero plant in the UK’, admit the designers. Indeed.
Lawn owners, on hearing ‘plantain’, tend to start growling like Doberman pinschers.
The Skincare garden has ‘part-ruined stupa, overgrown and reclaimed by foliage and textures such as bark, plants, moss and lichen’. Oh good, more moss. The Microbiome Bowel Research Garden, with sprawling, edible tendrils, ‘inspires people to rewild their diets’.
The Junglette garden ‘promotes biodiversity with integrated bat boxes’. We once lived in a house with bats in its eaves. The smell of bat pee became insufferable. Talking of which, Chelsea has a Freedom from Torture Garden, ‘a curvaceous and immersive space where the visitor can engage in therapy one-to-one. The communal bread oven brings survivors together to share stories and build new friendships’.
An artist’s impression suggests a plot with twined willow, Mediterranean saltbush and cardoon thistles. Sit on one of those and you won’t be ‘sharing stories’. You’ll be cursing the idiot who failed to dig it out with a trowel.
Daffodils – including the ‘King Charles’ – are exhibited on press day at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show at Royal Hospital Chelsea
The National Autistic Society garden at Chelsea looks a jumble of building blocks and anodised aluminium but we are told this is a ‘mesmeric kinetic sculpture, alluding to the inner mind’s complexity and beauty’.
In plant terms that means ‘textured curling bark sits alongside large crusted blocks of expanded cork’ and ‘pickled pine’. In our garden at home the only cork has come from a bottle of vino collapso and the only thing pickled is me after a day’s mortal combat with the brambles and stingers.
The Pulp Friction garden — for people with learning disabilities — offers an overhead hoop made from recycled fire hoses. This will allegedly ‘foster diversity, inclusion and equality’. Equality is not a virtue one easily associates with the snortingly exclusive Chelsea Flower Show.
Meanwhile, the Size of Wales Garden has a fungus fence, the No Adults Allowed Garden has ‘oversized bog plants’ and there are more fungi at the Tomie’s Cuisine the Nobonsai Garden, along with wild strawberry and wild carrot. We have those in our garden and they’re a menace.
Oh well, I thought, at least the National Trust Garden at Chelsea will restore one’s faith. Think again. One of its main plants is my arch foe herb robert. Have they gone mad? In a way, yes. It’s politics. Traditional horticultural order is out of fashion because it demands effort and a certain amount of knowledge — my wife knows the Latin names for endless plants — and is therefore hierarchical. That offends egalitarianism.
And so, instead of beautiful, banks of dahlias and lupins and lilies, show-goers will encounter the Chelsea Repurposed Garden, a glorified scrap yard with salvaged steel columns and concrete benches and a few drought-tolerant grasses planted in crushed concrete from demolished buildings. It’s gardening’s answer to grunge. Ugliness equals equality.
Set off your beds with a striped lawn? How lower middle-class of you. Chelsea 2024 is almost lawn-free. There are remarkably few roses, too. The late gardening writer Christopher Lloyd declared that an unpruned clematis looked like a disembowelled mattress. Margery Fish, a 1950s gardener, averred that ‘it is nice to take a walk in the garden and better still if you take a hoe with you’.
Most of us, when walking in the garden, succumb to the urge to marvel and deadhead as we go. There is something deep within us that wishes to beautify and improve. Why does the Chelsea Flower Show sneer so at that most decent of aspirations?
