My Personal Chelsea Flower Show Gold

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On the grounds of the Royal Hospital, the Chelsea Flower Show is coming to a massive conclusion with its sale on Saturday until 5:30pm. Ticket holders can shop and collect items that have caught their eye, be it fuchsias for bed this summer or fine delphiniums for a second flowering in September. There is much more to take home than drab patches of Nettles or “sustainable” bindweed.

As expected, the press prior to the show denied reality. The RHS gave space, though not much, to the feeble exhibits of invasive weeds in British gardens, disguised as butterfly and pollinator friendly. During my two days at the fair I couldn’t find most of them. Instead, I spent time in the main gardens, which are much more interesting than they were 10 years ago. Some of these are now sponsored by Project Giving Back, the socially conscious charity that curates gardens linked to other charities and helps fund their requests for space in Chelsea.

The gardens are then given a second life in real space after the show. The Fauna and Flora garden will live on at the Eden Project in Cornwall. The RSPCA garden is a “contemporary interpretation of a wildlife sanctuary” including a pond supposedly to encourage foxes. The good news is that it will go to the RSPCA educational center at Nantwich in Cheshire, too far away to harass my garden with more rabbits, badgers and foxes and destroy my life’s work.

The balance between the indoor and outdoor spectacle has been reversed. Usually the displays inside the Grand Pavilion trump everything else, but this year I enjoyed the outdoor gardens even more. There are some fine indoor exhibits and masses of interest, but there are fewer of the big show-interrupting exhibits that traditionally cap off the magic of the show. The rhododendrons, the tender orchids, the very large displays of sweet peas or shrubs and the small auricles have disappeared and the alpine plants have been reduced to a single display.

Some of the specialized nurseries have had demanding seasons, first, from
the very high cost of heating their greenhouses in winter, after the cold and gray spring. The peonies had not opened in time and the gladioli were cut back. Roualeyn Fuchsias opted to reduce her display to a circular display like a circus roundabout, lit by annoyingly bright bulbs.

As a result, the view across the Pavilion has lost some of its floral profusion and wonder. In it, Raymond Evison’s display of clematis is stunning, including his new Striped Mauve Tumaini, which will be just the thing for many of you, bursting with flower buds on a mound of stems just 2 feet tall. It is perfect for large pots on a partially shaded balcony.

Jacques Amand also dazzled us with magnificent hardy orchids, especially the new cypripediums and calanthes, which are hybrids bred by the great Dutch growers, Anthura. Amand explained to me that they can be grown in sheltered London gardens in raised beds of neutral to acidic, very well drained soil. The rainy winter, he says, is a much bigger enemy to them than winter frosts, so dig up lots of sand and then expect outdoor orchids in bright white, pink and yellow, a new direction for all of us.

Four years ago, most large outdoor gardens were boringly planted. The designers seemed to think that clumps of hardy geraniums, poor forms of Iris sibirica, and repeating cirsium thistle were enough for their “plant material.” Thoughtful diversity is much more evident this year.

I have had many options when bestowing my personal Gold Garden Award. I do so without consulting the medals the RHS awards, including Best Show Garden awarded to Horatio’s Garden, by Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg, or even the People’s Choice results, the vote of visitors and spectators, not the judges of the RHS.

Due to the cold and gray spring, the peonies had not opened in time and the gladioli were cut back

The best garden in the show showcases wildflowers with a touch more fascinating than British bindweed and buttercups. Letter from a Million Years Past is a masterpiece that South Korean designer Jihae Hwang has been crafting for many years. Following his gold medal at Chelsea in 2012 in a design evoking the line between the two Koreas, he took time out to recover his health.

His exhibition is based on plants, often medicinal, and the ecology of Korea’s Jiri Mountains, evoking them, he explained, not simply creating them. “Ideas are very flexible” and, on the spot, he developed every detail based on the image he had in his head. The expert growers at Crûg Farm nursery in Wales grew seeds she sent them and also lent various Korean shrubs and trees from her stock. I struggled to name them, from lindera to oplopanax.

Right down to the smallest plant on the windowsill of his little herb drying tower, he has thought of every detail. He has devised the ultimate tribute to the evolution of nature, wildflowers and landscape, based on hundreds of never-before-seen plants in Chelsea and tons of rocks from Aberdeen, chosen from two personal rock-hunting trips to Scotland. “Because I’m short,” he told me charmingly, “I like short plants”: the garden will be transferred to a cancer charity at Maggie’s Center and she will live.

I wonder if this incredible achievement will also top people’s polls, as its planting and design have layers of subtlety that are hard to take in from a vantage point behind the ropes on Main Avenue. I have cast the votes of my people separately after choosing between more accessible alternatives.

Sarah Price has done a nice job with an exhibit based on the artist. cedric morrisThe garden at Benton End, Suffolk, which he visited in his owner’s lifetime. I didn’t choose the thick table on its right side, but the beige colors of the main surfaces and especially the lower floor are excellent. Morris’s subtly colored irises ran through it, three varieties to me, but Price confirmed that he has used nine, including Benton Lorna and others named after friends and animals.

Off Main Avenue, the “biophilic” Japanese garden of moss, water and stone runs nearby, designed by master Kazuyuki Ishihara, who led his uniformed disciples with his personal staff as he arranged boxes of moss bought from Covent Garden Market. . He even ended up designing a hidden moss alley at the back of the exhibit.

My runner-up to the old garden of letters, however, is Mark Gregory’s ‘edimental’ garden for Savills, a superb mix of herbs and vegetables in neatly bordered flower beds, leading to a sunken area in front of a well-designed façade reminiscent of a hotel. . kitchen. Include ornamental plants, as many of our edible areas do. There is even some samphire in a container of salty seawater. Every day at noon uniformed Chelsea retirees eat lunch on site, prepared by a master chef from what the garden exemplifies.

Implicitly, royal gardening has responded to the fashionable rhetoric about “renaturation.” In their beautiful display of montane plants, amid blue meconopsis poppies and lavender, Kevock’s garden plants display a group of Androsace bulleyana with their scarlet blossoms atop tiny rosettes. It dies after planting and is in retreat on the slopes of its native mountains in Yunnan and Tibet. It’s safe in gardens like Kevock’s, thanks to a craft the RHS must bring to the fore, letting the elders of the soil drill our gardens to death: the craft of good old-fashioned gardening.

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