Chelsea Flower Show

from Essential Magazine May 2022

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Fabulous floristry ©RHS/ Georgi Mabee

CHELSEA FLOWER POWER

London is buzzing this month and it’s not just the sound of bees heading to Chelsea Flower Show. checks out the poshest garden party on the planet where the corporate hospitality tents are a heaving hive of humans soaking up the atmosphere of pollen, privilege and power.

“I just come and talk to the plants… they respond I find.”

Prince Charles

It’s London Fashion Week for Plants, a living catwalk to the haute couture of horticulture where the world’s wizard growers and landscape architects showcase their spring/summer collections for gold medals, glory and, maybe, a commission from a sheik. The Royal Horticultural

Society’s flagship flower show is back in bloom for its 109th season, having been nipped in the bud by Covid in 2020 and transplanted to autumn last year. It pops up in the splendid grounds of Royal Chelsea

Hospital for just one week like a miracle, if you don’t count the team of 8,000 staff required to perform it. Tens of thousands of plants all blooming in unison, and fantasy show gardens many a lord couldn’t afford with lakes, waterfalls and forest trees – 11 metres tall is the record; over 2,000 tonnes of soil is excavated for every show. There’s just three weeks to set it all up, complete with catering and plumbing, and 11 days to put the lawns back afterwards. Although millions watch it on TV, there’s only room for 160,000 visitors a year to experience this scented psychedelic spectacle and the RHS has no trouble charging £85.85 for every oversubscribed public ticket. July’s Hampton Court Palace show costs a third of that, and it’s bigger. But Chelsea’s cachet is priceless. Falling between the Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race in April and Henley in June, Chelsea has been the horticultural highlight of the London Season since King George V and Queen Mary topped its pedigree guest list. Their granddaughter Queen Elizabeth has rarely missed a Preview Monday since she became RHS patron in 1952. The ensuing champagne-fuelled party is for invited celebrities, cabinet ministers, the titled and entitled who obligingly pop up between the greenery for press photos. The Charity Gala Dinner is even more exclusive. There’s a ballot for tickets and you have to be invited to enter it. ›

The Queen in 2019 © RHS/ Luke MacGregor

There’s a pecking order for the rest of the week too, with RHS members-only days on the Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving three days for commonor-garden folk. Children under five, prams, pushchairs, dogs and garden gnomes (considered vulgar) are outlawed completely, although gnomes were reprieved for the 2013 centenary. Sponsors pay by the barrow load for an entrée to this elite sphere – £2.5m, according to one, for gala tickets, a show garden on Main Avenue and five days of schmoozing clients over Champagne breakfasts and power lunches in perfumed garden settings. Regulars say they do more business in five days here than the rest of the year put together. McBeans Orchids, winner of 70 Gold medals, has been coming since 1913 and not just for the glory. You can get as seriously horticultural as you like at Chelsea, right down to Latin names and roots, but it’s not all about the plants. According to the Society’s own research, the show has the highest CEO-count of any other event in the London Season, and most of them wouldn’t know an allium from an aspidistra. ›

King George V and Queen Mary, 1930s © RHS/ Georgi Mabee

Posing among the peonies © RHS/ Luke MacGregor

As well as fulfilling its pledge to ‘inspire a passion for gardening’, the RHS also makes a tidy profit which funds its gardens, libraries, competitions, scientific research, training courses and school projects. Founded as a registered charity in 1804, there are now over half a million members entitled to add the letters MRHS after their

names. Flower power entwines itself through the entire London borough during Chelsea Week. Every shop, café and bar from Kings Road to Sloane Square adopts the floral theme for the RHS Chelsea in Bloom competition and it’s hard not to get swept up in the floral frenzy. “There’s something about Chelsea with its amazing mix of spectacle and extreme expertise,” observes Sophie Campbell, author of A Summer Whirl through the English Social Season. “People who have been thinking only about peonies or grass varieties all their adult lives, TV cameras swooping around and gardening celebs… I love it and I don’t even have a window box.”

The Duchess of Cambridge worked on the first RHS ‘wild’ garden © RHS/ Luke MacGregor

Chelsea is going wild © RHS/ Neil Hepworth

GOING WILD WITH MR WEED

Nettles, cow parsley and wayside weeds have equality with thoroughbred roses and rare hothouse hybrids for this year’s Chelsea theme. Designers were invited to ‘embrace the wild’ in their gardens with hedgerow plants and meadow flowers to create natural habitats that have wow factor for wildlife. It reflects a more naturalistic change of direction for the RHS whose new president, by pure coincidence, is a Mr Keith Weed. He started by striking slugs and snails off the official Top Garden Pests list on the grounds that they are vital to a balanced ecosystem. Instead of getting out the slug pellets, the RHS now recommends planting sacrificial species that slugs prefer next to prize specimens.

SHOW STOPPERS

Show gardens can feature as many as 8,000 plants, not including three ‘spares’ of everything to ensure the bee’s knees of perfection. Designer Bunny Guinness reckons on ‘£330,000 minimum’ for a Main Avenue ‘catwalk’ garden. “Nothing less would work, and that can easily go up to a million.” The Swiss Tourist Board, The Body Shop and Boodles the famous Bond Street jewellers are among this year’s deep-pocketed sponsors. The BBC, which broadcasts daily from the showground, has sponsored the Blue Peter Garden since the late great Percy Thrower designed the first in 1974. ›

ZEN Garden by Japan’s Ishihara Kazuyuki is a hot contender this year

The conceptual Plantman’s Ice Garden, a Siberian woodland encased in a 3-metre thick cube of ice, is sure to be one of this year’s crowd-pullers. It will drip away to the tick of a Doomsday clock to show how the melting permafrost create ‘drunken forests’ with dire consequences for the planet. Memorable creations down the decades have included a sky garden suspended from a crane, a canal with working lock gates, an ornamental stream stocked with piranha fish and a cheat’s garden laid with artificial grass. In 2009 a riot over a Plasticine garden was averted by awarding it a Plasticine Gold Medal. But the RHS drew the line at scantily clad models who were evicted from a rock garden on the grounds that ‘livestock of any kind’ are not admitted to the show. ›

The Silk Road Garden, 2017 Trailfinders’ Undiscovered Latin America garden, 2019. © RHS/ Neil Hepworth

The Ice Garden should be pretty cool © John Warland

THE GREAT PAVILION

Imagine 3,230 ‘average-sized British gardens’ laid out in a single greenhouse for an idea of the scale of this monster structure, which takes 50 staff 2,000 hours to put up. A showcase to fabulous floristry and botanical innovation, the olfactory overload inside from tens of thousands of exotic blooms is equally overpowering.

As well as oodles of ideas for patios, terraces and teeny container gardens, there’s a Discovery Zone delving into the science of gardening and its power over mental health; a House Plants Studios offering inspiration for every room in the home; and 200 shops selling every kind of gardening gizmo, from posh boot scrapers to souped-up sit-on lawnmowers. Going round it all is no walk in the park. The 50 judges and four moderators who take three hours to allocate the awards would probably agree.

The Great Pavilion is a very long walk in the park

CHAMPERS WITH EVERYTHING

The fizz starts flowing at 8am, as the flowers are waking up, accompanying eggs Benedict breakfasts, smoked salmon and caviar lunches and Dorchester afternoon teas in a replica of the famous hotel’s drawing room. In between meals, there are Pimms tents. Visitors to the last show, clearly hardy perennials, polished off an epic 10,823 flutes of Champagne and 7,720 glasses of Pimms, and no one fell in the flower beds. ›

Gourmets make a beeline for Jardin Blanc where visionary French chef Raymond of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons fame presides over five days of florally-themed fare. Le Poppy on the closing Saturday offers continental breakfast with pitchers of Bloody Marys, a threecourse lunch with fine wines and – if you’re not too pickled – a front row spot at the Great Plant Sell-Off, sharp at 4 o’clock. ›

CHELSEA PENSIONERS

These sprightly old soldiers outdazzle the flowers on Preview Monday when they don their ceremonial ‘Scarlets’ for the party in their own back yard. The Royal Hospital Chelsea has been a retirement home for the exmilitary since King Charles II hired Sir Christopher Wren to design it, and its magnificent Palladianmeets-Baroque style has formed the regal backdrop to the flower show since 1913. Those eligible to live out their days in this Arcadian setting must be exBritish Army veterans over 65 with at least 12 years of service in the ranks, and provided they ‘fit in’ after a trial stay.

It’s fun but this mad hat is a no-no Dame Judi Dench, a rose between two Chelsea Pensioners, 2021

FLORAL FORMALITIES

Unlike Ascot’s toppers and tails and Henley’s pink blazers, there’s no longer a dress code for Chelsea. However Debrett’s Guide to Etiquette suggests that ‘skirts and blouses or frocks for ladies in preference to trouser suits are more in keeping with the sense of occasion’. Huge view-blocking hats and garish colours that clash with the flowers are absolute no-nos. But umbrellas and mackintoshes (posh waterproofs) are prerequisites for the perennially unpredictable British summer weather. e