Chelsea Flower Show preview: dinners, deals and delphiniums

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Next week begins the Chelsea Flower Show, a milestone in the gardening year. It will run publicly from RHS Members Day on Tuesday through the mass sale on Saturday. On days it opens at 8:00 a.m. for ticket holders and closes at 8:00 p.m., except on Saturdays, which end at 5:30 p.m.

The coveted gala night is Monday at 7pm, a high point in the corporate show calendar where financial deals dominate and deals are said to be made between delphiniums and daffodils. Not surprisingly, the Financial Times mixes Lex and Lane Fox in its Weekend menu.

The RHS has also offered a fancy menu, the opportunity to dine at the show on Monday from 9:00pm, with tickets costing £865 per person. With or without dinner, Monday night tickets are always oversubscribed and must be allocated by vote. The dinner list is long overdue. Proceeds go to charity, primarily the RHS itself.

This year’s sponsor of Chelsea is The Newt in Somerset, the hotel, restaurant, estate and garden that have been overseen by Karen Roos and her husband Koos Bekker, keen garden owners with excellent records in South Africa. The Newt occupies Hadspen House and her small estate, once the home of Penelope Hobhouse, later famous for her writing and her design plantations. Chelsea ties in with The Newt’s commitment to world-class landscaping and horticulture.

So far, this year’s exhibitors have been spared their worst nightmares, relentless sun and dry weather. In recent years they have made outdoor garden planting a particular challenge and many of the indoor displays have been difficult to time correctly for the big occasion. The early news is that half the plants in outdoor gardens this year will be classified as drought tolerant, up from 30 percent last year — imagine the whole count. Judges are instructed to consider, for the first time, whether gardens are green, especially in their choices for solid structures, paths, and surfaces.

All very well, but when is it an organic plant? The RHS has sent me their list of 10 drought tolerant plants to spot for this year’s Chelsea. They include common fennel, a dreadful planter that I exclude from my garden; shivering breeze grass, ditto; rockroses, most of which died last winter; and a short spurge, Euphorbia myrsinites: exudes a milky juice that inflames the skin and eyes if touched.

Once I rubbed my eyes with spurge juice-filled fingers and ended up in the hospital the next morning. The nurse who killed me in pain told me that pain is the closest a man can get to the pain of childbirth. Spurges are prohibited in my garden.

What about beautiful tulips or gladioli? There is a risk of thinking twice here. In the exhibition’s inner sanctum, its main pavilion, I expect to marvel at the superb tulips displayed by Bloms Bulbs each year and the excellent gladioli displayed by Pheasant Acre Plants. Both frequently win gold medals, but neither shows plants that are easily ‘sustainable’ in Britain. Bloms tulips rarely persist beyond a glorious year, but who’s going to give up tulips because they’re unsustainable? This year, in the recent cool weather, they have been magnificent.

Gladioli usually don’t survive outdoors in winter, although some of mine are surprising me this year. Inside the pavilion, tulips and gladioli win gold. Outside, will the gardens that contain them be marked out? If so, how boring.

Royal visits to the Chelsea show are part of its cache and recent royal events will put a new spin on the show. The RHS garden will display a bronze statue of King Charles amid an expanse of blue-flowered camassias that he rightly loves in his Highgrove garden. There will be a Royal Celebration and Reflection Garden featuring some of the royals’ favorite flowers, including Clematis Duchess of Cornwall.

Harkness Roses have designed their excellent display in the shape of the Union Jack – I look forward to seeing how they have brought in the still elusive blue in roses. I particularly want to see Agrumi Topiary’s life-size topiary tribute. It is a replica of the heroine of last autumn’s royal funeral, Emma, ​​the late Queen’s highland pony, who paraded to watch the procession pass at Windsor Castle. I’m not sure if the current Queen will have a custom tribute. Ottershaw Cacti is showing off a new aeonium called Coronation, billed as a fleshy-leaved succulent.

I have yet to see an exhibit called The Stressful Garden, a airbrushed look at Chelsea

I doubt the flower arrangement displays will measure up to the flowers in the Abbey for the coronation. They were hard to fully enjoy on TV coverage, but they were excellent, the work of Shane Connolly, familiar to attendees of recent FT weekend festivals in London. They were imprinted with the personal choices of the King and Queen, seasonal, sometimes sentimental, echoing her bridal bouquet and the late Queen’s favourites, but also rooted in the gardens and scenery outside the ceremony.

Like my FT buddy Jane Owen reports, the RHS goes even further with gardens showcasing ‘native’ plants for insects and pollinators. It’s true that its president is Keith Weed, but do we really have to have entire weed gardens in Chelsea, even from the Royal Entomological Society?

I’m skeptical. The gardeners’ war on weeds isn’t just about aesthetics. Space invaders compete for nutrients and choke what they catch. It is misleading to limit “pollinator plants” to only what gardeners continue to classify as weeds. Butterflies love exotic buddleias, while bees loves peppermint, lavender and a host of non-native ornamentals and will also breed on foreign ivy.

Mental health and healing have also jumped onto the show’s agenda. I have yet to see an exhibit called The Stressful Garden, the look of our beloved hobby that is airbrushed out of the Chelsea image. Perhaps that is why I enjoy the spectacle so much, as if the recent winter had not killed all the hebes and the fauna had never stripped the bark of the fruit trees.

Large shrub displays are no longer in the main pavilion as the Hilliers and Notcutts, its traditional mainstays, have been removed at the expense and hassle, but the roses and clematis will make up for it. I will be enjoying the new arrivals to the nurseries, especially the perennials from Pelham Plant Nursery, Pineview Plants and No Name Nursery, all keen growers of unusual varieties we have not seen before in Chelsea.

This year I consider myself a special Chelsea Pensioner. 60 years ago I first visited the Chelsea Show. I still remember the wonder of being weed-free then, right down to the big blooms on the unsustainable begonias. Once again I will look at that great sight in the summer calendar, the indoor display of so many wondrous blooming plants, and bless the fact that growers and nurseries can still transport me to an ideal paradise.

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