Chelsea Flower Show

Before I left Seattle, I bought a ticket to the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show. I could only buy a ticket for the time slot 5:30 to 8pm on Thursday May 27. The Show started on Tuesday, officially opened by the Queen. The first three days of the show are reserved for RHS members, and is held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, a very grand army veterans' retirement home. Several of these elderly gents, dressed in their lovely scarlet uniforms, were sitting on Lutyen benches, watching the crowds pass by.

I picked up my ticket (very pretty, with a silver embossed foil label in the top left: a keeper) at the "will call" tent. At 5:20, I joined the queue of generally elderly folks, and we all surged through the turnstiles. The place was totally mobbed, crowds three people deep around the show gardens, reminiscent of NY's Times Square on New Year's Eve, so I went into Grand Pavilion, which hosts the plant vendors, and was somewhat less jammed. Plenty of stands, some totally wierd (check out the balls of flowers in the photo), and staffed by people wearing suits, busily scribbling orders for irises, delphiniums, fuchias, chrysthanthemums,fuchias carnivorous plants, topiaried fruit and vegetables, and roses, roses, roses, and, more roses.

I fled out the back and found one of the refreshment areas. Here I could buy some expensive cappuccino, a British banger hot dog on grainy bun, or some exceptionally authentic looking (i.e., greasy battered) fish n chips. I setteled for a strawberry ice cream cone.

I wandered about, trying not to enter any of the sales stalls while licking the ice cream: decks, lawn furniture, reproduction statues of Mercury, fountains, greenhouses, garden spades so beautifully made, they looked like you could use them as salad servers, not get all dirty doing any digging. Lots of stalls showing works by botanical artists or flower photographers, batik silk scarves (flower subjects, naturally), pretty garden gloves, panama hats, wellington boots, including the stall from Dubarry (photo here), an Irish tweeds and leather clothier. I doubt I'd wear their gear when mucking out my barn. The young woman modeling the riding jacket and goretex lined leather boots told me they start around £250. But they did include a water-filled plastic dish on the display floor (yes, that's a carpet), so you could test the waterproofing I suppose. There were razor-sharp bonsai pruning tools sold by well-dressed Japanese folks, vertical garden beds for apartment dwellers, horticultural books and lots of seed sellers. Hmm. I didn't see a John Deere stall or a forklift from Caterpillar, Inc. I must have missed it. Everything else was there.

Finally, I elbowed back to look at the show gardens. They were divided in 4 sections: Show, Urban, Courtyard and Generation. The layout was a bit confusing, and there were still lots of gawkers. Most of the photos in this post are from either the Show or the Courtyard parts. I think I totally missed a whole section due to the crazy layout. Oh well. My favorites included Trailfinders Australian Garden [a gold medal winner] and Kazahana (A light snow flurry from a cloudless sky) which won something called a "silver gilt" medal. They've got to be kidding. If I'd been judge, they'd have won gold. Those two Japanese designers must have placed all the varigated moss up the wall of the display using toothpicks and tweezers. Another really cool one involved a cave, covered in artifical turf, that hosted a waterfall, and had an orchid house hidden in the back where a kitchen would normally be. This is officially called The Easigrass Garden (The Urban Plantaholic's Kitchen Garden). You can't make this stuff up.

I thought the Aussie one was great: lots of hardscaping, and drought hardy and familiar plants (to me), plus, it was actually a low work garden, and totally outside the normal garden aesthetic around here. All those beautiful flower filled courtyard gardens are full of work intensive annuals, and would need love and care every day.

Given how expensive this show is, I was surprised that the vendors weren't giving out much free loot. I think I scored a few packet of sunflower seeds, and several invitations to share my email so I can win a trip somewhere. Many of the gardens had some charitable tie in, but it was all a bit too much to take in during a 2 1/2 hour run through. The show sold out weeks ago, but I did pass two shifty looking touts on the street offering to "sell you's a ticket, guv'ner?". Hey, only in London is there a market for contraband garden show tickets!

The joy that is Chelsea has spilled out into nearby Sloane Square. Various shops are getting into the act. Cartier has a big poppy spilling through its front window. Others are wreathed in rose wreaths or giant urns packed with ferns and flowers.

The BBC is doing daily coverage of the Show all week. You can stream it here.