Made in Chelsea
After watching a lot of the Chelsea Flower Show this week, I am all Chelsea’d out. It’s the world’s leading horticultural show and given the enormous number of hours the BBC devotes to it, it’s emphatically the world’s most televised flower show.
Now they say that Chelsea isn’t supposed to provide a garden blueprint; the show gardens aren’t there to be copied. They’re created to provide inspiration, to give us ideas, for us to take notes. Well, I’ve jotted down a few random notes in my moleskin notebook.
Hugging it out. Whenever I switched on there was always this lady who looked a little bit like Eddie Izzard wandering round the show gardens hugging unsuspecting gardeners. I’ve seen people like this in America. They wear T-shirts that say, ‘I give free hugs’. The RHS equivalent was better dressed but she was certainly determined to hug it out. And there was always this fantastic moment when the targeted huggee wasn't sure if it was going to happen but knew that because there was a TV camera in attendance, there was no avoiding it.
Proper Yorkshire. The Yorkshire garden won a gold medal and an award for Best Construction, and also the People’s Choice award. Joe Swift said in one of the broadcasts that garden centres across the country were bracing themselves for people rushing off to buy things they’d seen at Chelsea. So after seeing the Yorkshire garden I was outraged when I went down to Squires and couldn’t find any sheep’s wool, sheep turds or a rusty metal gate. This kind of movie-set nonsense garden follows on from gardens with boats and Morris 1000 vans. After seeing it I definitely don’t feel inspired to go out and apply stone cladding to the shed, it’s theme park nonsense.
The name is Frost, Ernst Stavro Frost: It’s very unusual to see a Gardeners World presenter attempt a comedy accent, but there was no denying it, Adam Frost had a go. Sitting in one of those suspended, egg-shaped, 60s chair in a show garden he swung it around, pretending to be Bond villain Blofeld stroking his white Persian cat. An entire nation shouted ‘Don’t do the accent!’ but it was too late. What came out was like a Russian Danny Dyer – messy.
James Wong needs to give in and buy a bigger shirt size. Watching the strain on those buttons as he leapt around the stands with his puppy-like enthusiasm was sometimes too much.
I never realized that U.S. hip-hop act the Wu-Tang Clan were keen gardeners, but their water garden turned a few heads.
I loved the fact that Chris Beardshaw won Best in Show for his garden. I’m fed up with show gardens that centre on extravagant architecture or avant garde sculptures or colossal water features that could never be replicated in everyday gardens. The pavilion in the Morgan Stanley Garden wasn’t quite so radical and it looked like Chris’s design for the NSPCC was the closest to a normal garden.
Good to see Rachel de Thame talking to Joe Swift, if only briefly to explain why she’s taken a step back from presenting. Quite a few plants are named after her, unlike Claire Balding, who it was surprising not to see at a marathon BBC outside broadcast. Given that every presenter who had ever made an appearance on Gardener’s World was taken out of the Big Box of Presenters to fill the enormous broadcasting void, it was odd not to see Claire in there somewhere helping out. I’d like to see one of those stone plants named after her. You know, one of those square-shaped succulents that matches her favoured ‘boxy’ hairstyle – Lithos baldingii. Marvellous.
There was a very funny moment when the Reverend Richard Coles, fresh from his Strictly Come Dancing success, came to the show with his partner who was billed simply as ‘Reverend David’. As they were both in ecclesiastical garb, it looked a bit like an episode of Father Ted (give or take a catechism) where Ted and Dougal go to the Chelsea Flower Show. And it was also unusual that ‘Reverend David’ had no surname. It was a little bit coy. Perhaps he’s like Adele, or Pedro, the footballer, and only known by his first name. Or perhaps the Bishop didn’t know that they’d both swung the same day off without letting him know.
Very late on in the week Monty Don interviewed photographer Martin Parr, a man who has made a living taking very ordinary photos of very ordinary British life. He had been snapping away at the show photographing the punters smelling roses and being very British at a British institution. When asked by Monty if there was anything unusual about the crowd, Martin said that Chelsea was utterly middle-class and that it was a side of Britain that was generally unseen. Clearly a man who has never been to a garden centre, then. This acknowledgement that Chelsea was a festival of middle-classness seemed to amuse Monty who in the past has railed against things such as public schools. It was almost as though Martin Parr had said something the organisers might find uncomfortable, a little too near the knuckle. However Monty couldn’t possibly condone an attack on middle classness; he was wearing a scarf loosely tied round his neck while drenched in sunshine and temperatures of 24C, and he owns two golden retrievers, one of which has written his own book.
Nick Bailey did quite a bit of presenting and he is eminently watchable, but I only saw Frances Tophill twice – that’s like Liverpool playing the Champions League final and bringing Mohamed Salah on for the last five minutes.
Finally it was lovely to see Peter Seabrook introducing the hydrangea that had won Plant of the Show. Peter was a star of old school gardening programmes from the 1970s. If you’d still like to see a gardening programme from the 1970s, you can catch up with The Beechgrove Garden on the BBC i-Player.
