Dismayed In Chelsea
Tune into BBC this week and you won't be able to avoid the Chelsea Flower Show. But for those of us who have seen enough vernacular planting, enough 'this-is-the-future-of-gardens', enough great big slabs of rock, wood, concrete ("craned in only two days ago!") there's a really good excuse for skipping it – it’s the brilliant Chelsea Fringe (Chelseafringe.com).
The problem with the RHS Chelsea show is that it needs a kick up the arse. In the Radio Times’ preview they trilled “the buzz this year is over the return of the landscape designer and guerrilla gardener Dan Pearson after more than a decade.”
Well, actually he was back last year and was interviewed by the BBC sitting alongside Thomas Heatherwick (of 2012 Olympics cauldron fame). Neither wanted to be outwardly critical of the organisers but Heatherwick hinted that the whole thing lacked a direction and needed a curator.
Watching them give very guarded answers you could see they had a myriad of ideas to make the show better, but saying them ‘live’ on camera was like denouncing Kim Jong-un on North Korean television and expecting to make it back to the car-park. Summary execution of critical garden designers isn’t the way of the Royal Horticultural Society, but they can flex their muscles.
The problem with a lot of the Chelsea gardens is that they look like a corporate courtyard for some city bank that feels obliged to have a ’nice outside space’ for its employees to de-stress. Typically they’re based around some stupendous hard-landscaping feature, a wall of glass with cascading water – some great paving, (Tajikistan rose marble is very ‘in’ this year) and a bit of planting at the margins. It might be nice spending five minutes in there collecting your thoughts about the latest LIBOR investigation, but that’s about all.
Chelsea gardens seldom look like they could be played in by two- and three-year-olds – unless they let Diarmuid Gavin loose on a plot – and then they look as though they were designed by two- or three-year-olds. All the crayons are used.
There was a phase when they had ‘replica gardens’ such as Julie Toll’s seaside garden, which just looked like Derek Jarman’s famed Dungeness garden, but with all the inspiration taken out. Nobody was going to come away from the show and think to themselves, “hmm, I’m going to go home and copy that”.
Chelsea needs someone to shake it up. Or maybe, the rise of the Chelsea Fringe will help do that.
Director Tim Richardson has put together a massive London-wide programme of events as far apart as Twickenham in the west, ‘Exploring Arcadian Twickenham’ and Clapton Park in the east. You can only appreciate the range by going to the website - chelseafringe.com. The fringe events involve practical gardening workshops, talks, walks, events, art exhibitions and celebration of all things garden – some need to be booked, many are free.
They run from May 16th through to June 7th and there’s certainly more free events than the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It's been going for four years, but with any luck it will grow like Russian vine on Miracle-gro.
I should make it quite clear that my ciriticism of the RHS Chelsea Show is nothing to do with their outright rejection of my ‘The Scrapyard Garden’ 2012. This was an homage to nature and I thought an inspirational and inventive use of lush fern and moss planting. Take a bunch of rusty 1950s cars and cover them with moss. Beautiful. I wonder if Barclays might be interested…
