For me, and I hope for everyone who goes, Chelsea Flower Show is like
Christmas; all those good things, all that buzz, all that stimulation on one
day. It has its familiar smells and rituals as does Christmas — the trodden
turf and waft of roses in the marquees, the peering over shoulders to see
the gardens, and for me, the attempt to concentrate on the horticultural
riches when there are so many friends and colleagues to be distracted by.
Chelsea is a party which everyone can leave feeling provoked and fortified
rather than hung over. There is the odd garden, of course, which is a spiked
drink or a nightmare cocktail, but who cares; the good gardens always more
than compensate. But Chelsea’s a rough sport too, where designers and
exhibitors compete for medals, while the public watches like Romans in an
amphitheatre.
So this year, who will win Best in Show? I must say, I do usually manage to
get it right and this time my money is on Dan Pearson’s garden. It’s
earnest, precise, romantic, with a big budget and lots of flowers; a winning
combination with the judges. Not Diarmuid Gavin — too frivolous and not
enough flowers. The Bradley-Hole garden? Too cerebral and not enough
flowers. The Cancer Research Garden — maybe. It’s arty, with plenty of
flowers, and has the feel-good factor. Gold medal winners or not, the
following are all worth including on your list of “must see” gardens.
Dan Pearson’s garden promises to mimic the humps and bumps of the English
landscape. Well it might, for there is an upcoming trend in gardening to
ease back from our obsession with the waving cornflower-studded meadow
which, for all its romance, is an agricultural by-product. Instead there is
an interest in making a garden at home, by relating it to its surroundings.
This comes through nods to local landscape such as Pearson’s turf hummocks,
and it comes through materials — flint or slates perhaps, or glass — which
relate to a place’s cultural and industrial history, and the way people once
used the land. It is much broader than lovely old meadows.
In Pearson’s garden a sinuous path squiggles down between turf mounds to a
disc-shaped pool. In one side of the pool sits a great lens-shaped limestone
stepping-stone which lets you nip across the pool to the farthest part of
the garden where there is a large arc-shaped deck made from green oak,
bordered by a 10m-long bench. The garden is a very calm, curving slice of
nature, and looks set to be another of Pearson’s sweet, serene creations
that will linger in the mind for years to come. The quality will surely be
good as the garden is sponsored by the rich investment bank Merrill Lynch,
whose name was splattered over last year’s Chelsea television coverage like
raindrops in a downpour.
Cancer Research UK’s garden, designed by Jane Hudson and Erik de Maeijer,
manages to be reasonably free of the relentless symbolism which dogs so many
Chelsea gardens. Since when, in reality, could a border represent “the
duality of life” or even “life itself”? I can never understand why sponsors
ask for this nonsense when a garden, excellent on its own merits, could say
quite enough on their behalf. Fortunately most symbolic gardens still manage
to be good regardless of their symbolism, and Hudson and de Maeijer’s garden
promises to be a case in point. Better still, it features pebble mosaic
paths by the queen of mosaic work, Maggy Howarth.
Leyhill Prison has been making excellent gardens at Chelsea for several years
now. What fascinates me about its garden this year is the “war-torn cottage”
which overlooks the bomb-cratered garden. Of course it is topical, but more
than that I hope it will be an intrusion of blunt reality into the cosy
world of gardens. Why do garden buildings have to be pretty doll’s houses?
Eighteenth-century designers loved decaying buildings which spoke of a
troubled past, and perhaps Leyhill has returned us to a powerful tradition
here.
Inevitably different people are excited by different gardens, and two of this
year’s entries promise to hammer that home. The garden by Christopher
Bradley-Hole, for His Highness Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, and the
garden by the graduates of the Pickard School of Garden Design for
Woolworths, beautifully illustrate two attitudes to the same issue. Both
play with the use of ordered, elegant space and proportion, using lots of
geometric shapes and volumes, and broad blocks of planting.
Some people will go for the more varied planting of the graduates’ garden, and
its busier, jollier manner. Others will prefer the simplicity of
Bradley-Hole’s garden, where masterly restraint has been pushed to its
limits. He has used perennials and even roses to balance the geometry, but
restraint and control are the key to his work, as ever.
Laurent-Perrier and Harpers & Queen have teamed up with Terence
Conran to produce another of Chelsea’s foodie gardens, half restaurant and
half garden. We must expect “minimalism, glass and steel, relaxed chic”. And
here is a garden sporting green and brown restios, that group of South
African reed-like plants which has appeared over the past few years in
earnest plantsmen’s gardens where the climate is mild. Some would call them
subtle, others unnecessary. Some restios have the unendearing habit of
letting half their stems loll to one side as if a wind was blowing or they
were recovering from being sat on. But the restio in Conran’s garden,
Chondropetalum tectorum, keeps itself in a bold fan, and managed to
survive last winter’s minus 2 to 3C (26-28F) outdoors in a pot for me, in
Essex, and so looks promisingly useful in British gardens. Here it is teamed
up with the chunky, more succulent, heads of limey euphorbias and brown
sedums.
It is far too easy at Chelsea to be so dazed by the main show gardens that you
fail to get to the small gardens, and though they do not have large budgets
or such grand ambitions there is plenty of inspiration to be found in them.
My answer, always, is to stop for coffee and some mental screen-saving
before plunging in again.
Declan Buckley takes a virtual tour around them on page elsewhere in this
section, and I want to see two in particular. Harpak’s Moscow City Garden
uses plants and materials that will survive both extreme heat and extreme
cold; granite, ceramics and steel; pines, junipers, geraniums and euonymus.
There should be pointers here for many a northern garden.
For similar reasons I would like to see the Reflective Garden from Mouchel
Parkman Ltd. It will promote water recycling in city roof gardens, but once
again using plants for extremes, this time city heat and wind. It re-uses
elements of the cityscape such as old traffic signs and crushed hardcore —
the kind of recycling that can lead to nightmare gardens. But cleverly done
it can work beautifully. With a name like the Reflective Garden it’s in with
a chance. But seeing for yourself is what Chelsea is all about.
To plan your tour of the show gardens on an interactive map, or to see
details of the gardens from your home, visit www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/events/chelsea/gardens/map.shtml
