ALAN TITCHMARSH, the plant-like celebrity gardener, smiled smugly into a camera and assured us that “We are LIVE and INTERACTIVE from the Chelsea Flower Show”. “Live” outside TV broadcasts from a flower show? What have they got, action replays of the grass growing? Instant plotside interviews with the winning blooms? Apparently the first day’s live coverage was spoiled by the BBC strikers. Did anybody notice?



“I don’t want to go to Chelsea”, Elvis Costello once sang. However, now that gardening is the latest thing to be re-branded as “the new rock‘n’roll”, it appears that everybody wants to go there for the flowers as well as the football. (One medal winner even declared himself to be “over the Moon”.) The Royal Horticultural Society show has grown and spread like bindweed into a monstrous media, corporate and public happening that now seems like an unattractive cross between a society function, a fashion show and a public hanging — sort of Wimbledon without the balls.

Some of us, however, are still with Elvis on this one. I have nothing against flowers as such; I can enjoy a stroll around Hampton Court or Kew as much as the next parent desperate for something to do with the kids. But I have an aversion to the actual business of gardening that cannot entirely be accounted for by hay fever. Moreover, I do not think it can be a sign of a mature (in gardenspeak) society for the private business of watering and weeding to be hot-housed into a major public concern, so that normal adults spend so much time and money trying to keep up with the Titchmarshes. (This year at Chelsea, the in colour is purple, apparently. And if you still have passé decking in your garden, build a bonfire quick.)

I must give my late father much of the credit for my dislike of gardening. A Suffolk man of the old school, he grew every imaginable English vegetable using a shed full of strange and rusty tools that looked like ancient instruments of torture. The ordeal, however, was all mine, made to do the dull work of shovelling manure or picking up a million leaves by hand when I wanted to be smashing a football through the rose trellis. We have just had our northeast London garden made over — or more accurately, paved-and-grassed-over. Now we have a nice patio for eating and drinking, a lawn where the children can make crop circles with a paddling pool, and one bed where my wife can indulge our young daughters’ desire to grow a few vegetables. Dad’s involvement will hopefully be limited to the occasional wrestle with the mower. That is my idea of Eden.

It is easy to feel like a prickly thorn among roses in our increasingly garden-centric (horti-)culture. Of course, there is nothing new about people pottering about in gardens. Traditionally, however, it was seen as a private pastime, a respite from the hurly-burly of life and a retreat from the public arena; as Voltaire’s Candide insisted, whatever happened in the world outside, “we must cultivate our garden”. Now, by contrast, the line between the public and the private has become as indistinct as the muddy border between our lawn and vegetable patch. Gardening is one of the private pastimes that has grown in stature to fill the gap as our public and political life withers on the branch.

To judge by the multi-ringed circus at Chelsea this week, many more people seem to have developed a garden-shaped hole in their lives. Thus it is all over the media, and the bookshop shelves groan with a year-round crop of gardening volumes — a sort of flora-porn which, as with those gastro-porn cookery books, one suspects is often bought to be drooled over rather than put into practise.

Gardening, as Margaret Atwood has it, “is not a rational act”. But we British are a tolerant people, and should be prepared to accommodate the eccentricities of gardening fanatics — so long as their grubby habits are hidden from view. Weed it out of the public arena, put it behind the garden fence where it belongs, and leave the rest of us to do something more “live and interactive” than watching Mr Titchmarsh’s blooming ego.