a good Chelsea

The Chelsea Flower Show was as good as ever.  I first went in about 1986, when a friend gave me his mother's ticket that she was unable to use, and was hooked.  I joined the RHS on the spot, and have been to every Chelsea since.  Sometimes I've been by myself, and I've taken a variety of friends and relatives over the years.  Since my partner got more involved in the garden we've been together, and have developed a finely honed routine.

The first thing we look at is the Artisan gardens, before the crowds get too dense.  Having got an early train this morning, it took almost as long to travel from Liverpool Street to The Royal Hospital as it had to get into London, but we made it in time to get a good view.  My favourites were the waterside Welsh garden and the soul-cleansing Korean outside loo.  The hole in the Yorkshire garden's wall, criss crossed with string in reference to Barbara Hepworth, was fun too, though the overall effect was too fussy for me.

Then we look at some of the bigger gardens, trying to dodge the hotspots where celebrities have drawn in extra onlookers, or the BBC are taking up half the walkway.  I thought these were generally well done, but not ground-breaking.  Design seems to have reached a plateau for now.  There were lots of modernist inspired layouts of intersecting squares, strips or circles, softened with informal planting, and a smattering of naturalist wild gardens.  The diorama is almost dead, though Leeds City Council did have a working water wheel.  I was delighted that this won a Gold medal, since it was beautifully done, and the stand appeared to be staffed by the actual people from Yorkshire who had made the garden, and were ecstatic.  I don't know why at least half of the people manning most show gardens don't seem to know the names of the plants on their stand, but they don't.  It has ever been thus, and 2011 was no exception.

Purple is big, and lime green, dark red, and Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna'.  This is a lovely salvia with blue flowers on dark stems, and I have never seen so much of it before.  Umbellifers are in.  I am rather sad that Cleve West used parsnip flowers in his garden before I got round to it in my rose bed, as now it will look as though I have copied the idea from him.  Planting has gone very bee friendly, and I have never seen so many bees at Chelsea either.  I liked Cleve West's garden, including the pillars which I gathered some other visitors were not so keen on.  The Australian Garden presented by the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne was good, and it was interesting to see a different palette of plants.  We were taken with the textured sand coloured wall sculpted into waves like a vertical beach.  I asked how it was done, and the answer is that foam blocks were laser cut into the waves, and a surface finish applied.

Apart from 'Caradonna' the unexpected hit plant of the show was orange geums, which we saw in numerous species and varieties on a lot of different stands.  All came in soft shades of orange, with some colour variation within the petals, and I liked them.  It's strange how most years one or two plants seem to crop up everwhere.

The Diarmud Gavin hanging garden and B&Q vertical gardens left me unmoved.  The Systems Administrator said that to make the B&Q garden an authentic vision of B&Q, bits of it should have been drooping from underwatering, and there should have been a couple of fence panels randomly left in the middle of it.  The trees in several gardens were looking stressed, but the Leeds council boys were the only ones we saw get out the hose and water as necessary during the day.

We always go around the great pavilion together for a bit, then go our separate ways for an hour or two, so that I can obsess over individual plants while my partner walks about at a less back cripplingly slow pace, and has another look at the show gardens, or the machines.  I am afraid I might not have seen one or two of the plants in the pavilion, but I made a valiant attempt to look at all of them.  Bloms and Peter Beales both got Gold medals.  Phew.

We had a good look at the stands selling furniture and objets d'art, not with the intention of buying any of them, but to jeer at the particularly hideous and naff ones, and try to work out how we could rip off the nice things with homemade versions.  And we drank our annual glass of pimms (a bottle always seems to lose its appeal before the end) and ate our frugal packed lunch, now that we are not City high fliers, and I bought three coloured glass things to hang from a tree.  I haven't decided which yet.

And now I am going to go and watch it all again on television.

Addendum  It turns out we are recording the telly cover, to watch it later with supper.  I meant to say earlier (but I was rushing) that slate walls are in, as are Luzula nivea and Astrantia.  There was a nice piece of vertical planting behind a restrained water feature in The Magistrates Garden in the Urban Gardens section, which used coloured leaf begonias, Lamium and violas.  I suspect that walls of plants are difficult to keep going in real life, certainly the only one I've seen attempted in a private garden was mostly dead, but it's a lovely idea if you can make it work.  Turquoise blue astro-turf is not a good look in a garden setting.  I can't really imagine where it would be, or why anybody manufactures it.