Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
On Monday, Chelsea Flower Show begins for me, others from the press and guests at the pricey gala evening. It runs on for RHS members on Tuesday and Wednesday and then for ticketed members of the general public until Saturday afternoon, concluding with a sell-off of some of the exhibited plants.
I have lost count of the number of Chelseas I have attended. As it is certainly more than 54, I claim to be a rare class of Chelsea pensioner, hyperactive but a veteran nonetheless. I first saw the show in 1963: how many visitors can match that? It amazed me then as a wonder-world, especially its displays of annual flowers from seed, no longer exhibited, and its big begonias and delphiniums. Remarkably, they are still shown under the same business name, Blackmore and Langdon, though the company has changed hands several times and has had to reinvent itself.
“Been there, done that” is a maxim I much dislike, especially when applied to gardens and flower shows. One reason is that their “there”s and “that”s have a way of changing subtly from year to year. The exhibits inside Chelsea’s Great Pavilion are the glory of the show and never stand still. Next week visitors will be confronting plenty which nobody has “done” before.
Since the difficult years of the pandemic, followed by a leap in the price of fuel, some of Chelsea’s biggest gold-medalled exhibitors have stopped showing altogether. Hillier’s huge exhibits of trees and shrubs, and Notcutts’ similar range, beautifully colour-graded, were jewels in the crowns of previous Chelseas: incredibly, they no long exhibit. Bloms’ fabulous tulips are no longer on show either, nor are Cayeux’s irises from France, dimmed by Brexit just when they were establishing themselves as unmissable. Even McBean’s Orchids has backed out, despite winning gold medals year after year for its superb displays.
With hindsight, nursery growers’ exhibits at Chelsea in the 1990s were sky-high points in the show’s history. I was so lucky to have covered them for you but I will not let memories of them take my eye off what is to be enjoyed this year instead. The RHS has sent me a list of the 16 exhibitors who are new to the show’s Great Pavilion. Congratulations and a welcome to them: they range from the Bahrain Garden Club to G&K Carnations and Woburn Farm Plants with its alstroemerias. The fine gardens at Newby Hall in Yorkshire are coming south to exhibit “single Cornus with underplanting” and Sarah Cook, formerly a head of Sissinghurst gardens, is showing her reassembled range of historic irises, including those once bred by Cedric Morris, the painter and sharp-eyed plantsman, in his increasingly feted garden at Benton End in Suffolk.
Glendoick from Scotland is addressing what has been a big rhododendron gap at Chelsea. Frank P Matthews Ltd is a major supplier of fruit trees and ornamental trees to the retail trade, including the RHS’s own Wisley plant centre. It will be fascinating to visit its exhibit, including ornamental malus trees trained as espaliers. Back in Oxford my espaliers of wild Malus transitoria have just finished flowering profusely in a season which has been stunningly good for all ornamental malus.
Around the 16 newcomers, proven exhibitors will surely hit their usual heights on stands that visitors need to locate. Cut gladioli and dahlias from Pheasant Acre Plants have topped my personal prizes in recent years, as have roses from David Austin and Peter Beales, even without their revered founders’ living presence. It is excellent that the Alpine Garden Society is showing again after its long history of gold medals for mountain plants. Kevock from Scotland is persistently my pick of the show for its stands of rare alpine and woodland plants, brilliantly grown and interrelated. Dibleys remains lord of the streptocarpus and other easy house plants and Burncoose Nurseries from Cornwall is increasingly important for its shrubs in the absence of Hilliers and Notcutts.
A cluster of orchid growers will try to make up for McBeans’ absence and we are lucky to have yet another exhibit of clematis by their supreme grower, Raymond Evison from Guernsey. His stands have refuted my view that the show has little direct impact on my own garden. They have shown me that his homebred clematis, smaller plants, are ideal for pots and back yards.
Outside the exhibitors’ main pavilion, gardens have proliferated in the past 20 years. Should the show be renamed the Chelsea Garden Show? They certainly fascinate the TV cameras, an excellent channel for enjoying Chelsea without the crowds or cost. Small imaginative gardens, especially for balconies or courtyards, have an entire area to themselves. The bigger ones on Main Avenue are more ambitious than most of those shown in 1963. There will be plenty to criticise but remember the dry hot weeks that have led up to the show. They are nightmares for growers and planters. It is a feat to have surmounted them.
The RHS organisers have picked out several themes for me in this year’s gardens. It looks as if exhibits majoring on buttercups and cow parsley have, thankfully, been refined: I will not pay high ticket prices to see what is far better seen in fields, not flower shows. British flora will feature but this year in relation to distinctive landscapes. Four of the big gardens focus on parts of Scotland and one on the once-wet landscapes of England’s west coast, misnamed, in my view, the British “rainforest”.
In recent shows, Japanese designers have been pre-eminent, maestros of styles which were never shown in the 1960s. This year, we will see a garden with komorebi, their word for sunlight’s way of piercing a tree canopy. Another one promises a masterly take on a Japanese tea garden. Among non-Asian balcony gardens, one has even been designed as “a space to read”, a knack I have never mastered in my garden. Too much distracts me.
An entire cluster has been branded by the RHS as “Your Space, Your Story”. This vapid label claims to celebrate “gardeners’ individuality” and “how gardens can bring to life our greatest loves”. They do not: they are not aphrodisiacs. A prime exhibit here will be the RHS and BBC Radio 2 Dog Garden designed by the TV presenter Monty Don, let off the lead to be a Chelsea designer for the first time. Size matters here. I can enjoy little dogs in a garden but I insist that big retrievers, eagerly wagging their entire rear halves, are kept under control. They break too many plants. The publicity for Don’s Dog Garden praises it for its “distinct theme of balls”. Looking in, I will be remembering the classic advice of that great gardener, Esther Merton, who always urged lawn owners to “switch to a bitch” and follow up its puddles on the grass by applying soda water.
At lunchtime I will apply one long-learnt lesson: “my bag, my sandwich”. Catering at Chelsea involves queues and top prices, so I will find a vantage point, eat an egg sandwich and enjoy the show as a show. It is wonderfully removed from my garden’s reality. I will not shop and I will not be overpowered. I will marvel at its variety, a prolific display in May.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram