The countdown to the closing of Chelsea Flower Show begins this Saturday afternoon at 4pm. From then until 5.30pm visitors will scramble for plants they have already reserved or are hoping to find on sale. As they carry their greenery home, Sloane Square Underground station will briefly look as if Birnam Wood has come to the King’s Road.
Even at home, gardeners are activated by Chelsea, the most celebrated show in the Royal Horticultural Society’s calendar. Fans have already been shopping while watching the show on TV. A sales director at David Austin Roses told me that in the space of only half an hour, the company took orders for masses of roses when the BBC gave Austin’s exhibit the limelight. Middleton Nurseries, growers of salvias in the Midlands, has also had time on the TV screen. Beside its fine exhibit of half-hardy salvias, the owner told me that his website collapsed under a flood of orders.
Meanwhile, exhibitors have done a remarkable job after weeks of dry weather, worryingly hot in the daytime and then far colder at night. These weird conditions affected different families differently. Growers of shrubs agree that it has been a spring from heaven, never finer for magnolias, wisterias or ornamental malus. However, flowers on roses have had to be chilled and held back until the show began. Delphiniums, by contrast, came to a halt with most of their buds unopened, checked by the cold nights. Outdoor gardens have had to be watered frantically to preserve the flowers.
I had prepared for an anticlimax but found the opposite. Raymond Evison’s exhibit of clematis is superb, majoring on the lower-growing varieties he has bred in recent decades. From his recent Chelsea exhibits I ordered lilac-blue Parisienne and dark red Nubia, both of which are delighting me in pots, full of buds near my front door. This year’s stand shows that there are many other options, including Duchess of Cornwall, Diana’s Delight and white Corinne. This Chelsea exhibit is one we can all attach to at home.
Elsewhere the RHS has not worked out how to dominate the big central monument site. It is short of flowers and stronger on blank space beyond an entry made of straw bales. In the absence of some former big exhibitors, visitors have needed to revise their expectations of scale. Some of the new replacements are full of interest, though more compressed. Orchids have little stands only, but they include fine specimens. Hostas are well shown too, especially those from Sienna Hosta, which exhibits some unfamiliar ones with big, possibly slug-proof, leaves. Nobody has cracked the challenge of a big sweep of border plants or irises, but maybe a newcomer will train on for 2026.
On Monday, the press day, I rested among the roses of Peter Beales nursery, enjoying a free glass of champagne and a seat inscribed with the name of the late Beales himself, propagator and seller of so many rare old roses and author of Classic Roses, the book I turn to first for advice, assessment and ideas. On an arch above me the old climbing noisette rose Alister Stella Grey was covered in yellow-white flowers, entwined as if growing naturally. In front, another arch combined red Chevy Chase and that old white favourite, The Garland. Beales’ exhibits have always excelled at showing climbing roses, so hard to twine and pin plausibly.
I left my seat and was brought back to earth by a choir of Chelsea Pensioners attempting to sing the Seekers’ old hit, “I’ll Never Find Another You”. Instead I found two exhibits of the highest class. Kevock Garden Plants from Scotland had a stand of rarities, neatly graded into coloured sections, including white lewisias and varieties of Solomon’s Seal so small that they had almost disappeared in the accompanying moss. In my dry garden I can grow none of these plants, so I enjoy admiring them at Chelsea. Exhibits are just as inspiring if they are ungrowable by spectators.
Kevocks’ meconopsis poppies are good, but not as good as those nearby in my top small exhibit of the year. The Meconopsis Group is showing individual plants in many shapes and colours, from clear yellow to white, fine shades of blue, red and dusky purple red. Wonderfully, Meconopsis simikotensis from north-west Nepal was just opening a cluster of bluish flowers on curving stems, after which the parent plant will die. It has never been seen at Chelsea, a testimony to good fortune and skill.
My top bigger exhibit also shows plants unsuited to my garden. Kells Bay House & Gardens nursery from Ireland won Best Exhibit in 2023 and deserves it again now. Green tree ferns of all sizes are its speciality but its owner Billy Alexander tells me he has satisfied clients in London despite these ferns’ dislike of moderate frost. I asked if he could quote a price for one of his biggest many-trunked specimens, fit for an impatient FT reader. A basic £5,000, he answered, with £200 more for the post-Brexit paperwork and another £1,000 for him personally to deliver and help install it. Smaller ones would be far cheaper, including finely leaved Histiopteris, the bat’s wing fern from Australia. A sign calls these plants “primeval”, but in Ireland, Alexander explained, “primeval is a feeling”.
What about the outdoor gardens? There are no boring buttercups or stone walls pretending to be a Yorkshire Dale. The range and colouring of the planting are far superior to the dreary “wilding” that showed cow parsley all over the place four or five years ago. On Monday I had no idea of the official RHS medals. So here goes: my personal medals instead.
The most extraordinary achievement is the huge garden of carefully chosen stones and arid ground for succulent plants, quiver trees and so much else from the Karoo landscape in west South Africa. It is exhibited by The Newt in Somerset, patron of the entire show, whose owner Koos Bekker has property there too. If it points to arid gardens of the future I will give up gardening and train to cook soufflés instead. Its construction, planting and conception are superb, but the result is not a garden I could view with pleasure.
As winners, I need to combine several: the lines and lower planting of Tom Hoblyn’s Hospice UK Garden of Compassion, designed for “calm at the end of life”; the excellent zelkova trees in Jo Thompson’s colour-themed Glasshouse Garden; and the watercourse and planting of the Avanade Intelligent Garden, linked to AI and an app for regular maintenance. The Japanese Tea Garden is masterly but I was not attracted by its pristine thatched tea house. The planting by Nigel Dunnett in the sandy Hospitalfield Arts Garden wins my personal Gold, an excellent array of seaside thrifts, grasses and gypsophilas with other bright flowery options for dry ground.
It would win on all counts but for some brash stone seating and a drab shed. If I could plant Jo Thompson’s zelkovas instead of the Garden of Compassion’s unimpressive trees it would win instead. If I could move the Intelligent Garden’s watercourse to Dunnett’s, I could dispense with his seats. Four to play with, one to win: how seldom I have been so spoilt for a Chelsea garden choice.
Chelsea Flower Show, Royal Hospital Chelsea, London, until Saturday May 24; rhs.org.uk
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram