Chelsea was wonderful. I say that every year, and I went to my first one almost thirty years ago. I think it was in 1986 that a friend gave me a spare ticket his mother couldn't use, and I've been every year since.
2015 didn't feel like a ground breaking year. There were some good show gardens, plus the usual rump that leave you aghast that somebody did this on purpose and invested a great deal of money and effort in it, but there wasn't anything that looked as though it was ushering in a new decades long trend. Unless it was the rise and rise of the less than perfect maintenance garden, in which case ours is going to be bang on trend without my doing a thing differently.
The prize for the best show garden went to Dan Pearson's evocation of one of the wilder parts of the garden at Chatsworth, and it was well deserved. They'd got a big, triangular site which has thrown up some interesting designs, in particular one a couple of years ago depicting the North Korean border. The Chatsworth inspired garden was less earnest, just some very big boulders, skilfully placed so that they looked entirely natural, and some very good naturalistic planting with all sorts of choice, faintly wild plants, and weeds. Annual meadow grass, yarrow, all sorts of things that I spend time yanking out of the borders and the gravel. The way the garden plants and the weeds intermingled was amazing, and I cannot imagine how anyone managed to plant them to look that natural.
A perfumer's garden based on the Provencal landscape and traditional perfumier's ingredients was also shown in a state of semi dereliction, reflecting the industry's move in recent years away from natural plant based products. That also had some cleverly placed weeds, plus areas of roughly tended bare soil symbolising how the garden was starting to be reclaimed. It had a lovely atmosphere, helped by little canals modelled on the traditional irrigation channels, and a real sense of place. So maybe that's the garden zeitgeist in the age of austerity, weeds and a sense that things cannot be maintained as they used to be. Though nobody told the United Arab Emirates, who had brought a great deal of white marble to the party.
There were lots of other good things and nice touches, but if you wanted to know about them you'd be watching the BBC programmes. We will be, and we were there.
In the pavilion there still seemed to be plenty of UK nurseries, despite annual fears that the cost of mounting a Chelsea exhibit is now so great that people will stop doing it, and we'll be left with exotic set pieces that are really puffs for foreign tourist boards. Old stagers like Broadleigh step back from the rigours of Chelsea, but new ones like Kevock take their place. There are lots of very, very beautiful plants to admire, and since I'm fairly sure that himalayan poppies will not thrive in the dry air of north east Essex no matter how much I water them, the best place to enjoy them is in my annual pilgrimage to Chelsea. You get a little sense of the sheer effort that goes into the displays from the snippets you pick up as you walk round. The Devon based growers of pinks didn't just have to bring their plants to perfection, they dyed a hundred and fifty metres of hessian the right shade of sea green to provide a backdrop for the foliage, by hand.
In the old days of dropping twenty and fifty pence pieces in tupperware boxes I would come home with a bag full of catalogues, but nowadays everyone has a website. My show catalogue is sitting at my right elbow, and I shall spend many happy evenings looking up the Devon pinks, the lilies, pelargoniums, violas, and auriculas, and unusual plants for shade, and putting some orders together.
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