It's not about the flowers anymore
Helen Rock went to the Chelsea flower show and found it impossible for it to live up to its expectations of excellence in horticulture.
Maybe the Chelsea Flower Show has finally become a victim of its own success. Such is the hype surrounding celebrity designers and their show gardens in recent years, that "the greatest flower show on earth" is finding it impossible to live up to its own expectations of excellence in all things horticultural.
Certainly, this was not a vintage year for the jewel in the crown of its organisers, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), Britain's foremost gardening charity and watchdog on standards.
The fact that the overall winner in the top designer gardens was one of the weakest of a very mixed bunch – an inoffensive but cloyingly sweet and sentimental set-piece that over-indulged in World War II nostalgia on behalf of the veteran Chelsea Pensioners – is a case in point.
This wildly coveted Best in Show accolade went to 'A Soldier's Dream of Blighty', made to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in which many of them fought. Sponsored by Ecover, the people who make ecologically correct cleaning products, it was more like a bad film set than a cutting edge garden for our times. Set back in 1945 and decorated with homecoming Union Jack bunting, it boasted a 'Dig for Victory' vegetable plot containing old varieties, a thatched pub and an overgrown patch sown with wild flowers and symbolic red poppies, which had heat lamps trained on them to make them open in time for the judging.
Since its inception over 90 years ago, the Chelsea Flower Show has been opened each year by a member of British royalty, and the fizz-and-Pimms party that followed signalled the beginning of the London Season for high society. After that little excitement, it was all down to the business of gardening and the highlights were the specialist nurseries' brilliant displays of plants in the Great Marquee, not the show gardens and their celebrity designers.
These days, it is still opened by royalty on Gala Evening (no fewer than nine minor members this year) and there's still a fizz-and-Pimm's party. But while it remains a marvellous event, Chelsea no longer signals the start of the Season (What Season? You might well ask) and anyone at all with a few bob can bag a ticket, which is just another form of elitism. Time was when you'd never hear an Irish accent at Chelsea, but now our soft, mellifluous tones can be heard all over the grounds, situated on the Thames Embankment.
Newcomers are still dazzled by its delights (this year it was Marian Finucane's turn to looked dazed and happy as she made her maiden voyage around the showgrounds, there because her show was one of Diarmuid Gavin's sponsors, as everybody probably knows by now). And while it's still fairly full of the most beautifully arranged nursery and educational stands displaying wondrous vegetables, flowers, foliage and fruit, these have been diminishing perceptibly in recent years.
Now it's much more about the show gardens, showbiz and mostly minor celebrities jostling for the limelight on Press Day; though an occasional A-lister does show up looking cool, calm and collected. As for this year's selected theme of saving the environment, I don't really see how this can be justified when the show uses untold masses of chemicals and, much much worse, countless tons of wood chips, much of it coming from trees chopped down in the Brazilian rainforest – currently under further threat of extinction despite being one of the main lungs of the planet.
After the 'Best in Show' award, a gold medal is the next highest accolade at Chelsea. Alas, these were not awarded to the two Irish entries, one from Diarmuid Gavin Designs, the other from Ellen Landscapes, both of whom produced very good gardens indeed.
It was Gavin's fourth bid for gold and his best entry yet (though I never saw his first, a popular recreation of WB Yeats' tower that first brought him to public attention in the UK).
Sponsored by John Sisk's Park Developments (amongst others), who are bringing it back to front an apartment block at Hanover Quay in Dublin after the show, it was a model of restraint – pure Tuscany in the planting – and deserved its silver-gilt medal, which is the next highest accolade and the only one awarded to a show garden this year.
As always with Gavin, who is now a true-blue celebrity in his own right, there was the trademark space cadet element – five concrete pods with swings and an underground room – but this time they did not really jar; instead, they rose palely out of a dense planting of grassy, graceful lavenders (not yet in flower but all the nicer for that), and were echoed by dozens of clipped box balls. Other elements included pretty little clusters of blues and pinks, from aquilegias, verbascums and umbellifers, and, rather unnecessarily but in keeping with this year's trend, some tired looking vegetables planted in pots.
The other Irish show garden, Moat & Castle, took a respectable silver and was designed by Kildare woman Elma Fenton, of Ellen Landscapes. Whereas Diarmuid got state backing through Marian's RTÉ radio show, Elma got €25,000 from Horticulture Ireland at Bord Bia. Michael Maloney, Director of Horticulture, thanked Ellen Landscape Designs "for holding the torch high and shining a light on the wealth of creativity and construction know-how evident amongst Irish designers and garden contractors."
Charlie Dimmock of BBC's Groundforce thought it one of the top three in the show, and leading English designer, Christopher Bradley-Hole, whose own meticulous garden drew gold, also admired it greatly. Elma's garden, an eco-friendly 'cut and fill' design which retains all soil on site, was constructed by an all-Irish team with many, though not all, of the plants sourced from Irish nurseries.
Irish model and Kildare friend of Elma, Jasmine Guinness – whose grandfather is Desmond Guinness of Leixlip Castle – officially launched the garden by modelling an amazing, technicoloured butterfly hat made by Irish milliner, Philip Tracey. Elma's design featured two beautiful, mature apple trees that looked as though they were dancing, a plant-filtered swimming pool (complete with a swimmer doing laps on press day), a shelter pavilion, a calm expanse of meadowland and sculpted landforms reflecting natural valleys and plateaux. While designed for Chelsea, the garden layout was intended for everyday practical use by an environmentally aware family.
The other big name who designed a garden was Terence Conran, father of clothes designer Jasper and founder of Habitat, Bibendum and a string of successful restaurants. His 'Imperial War Museum Peace Garden', again marking the 60 years since the end of World War Two, was not a success and garnered a mere Bronze Flora medal. While it had beautiful elements, including mostly white plants splashed here and there with the requisite symbolic red poppies, it was really a bit of a mess and quite incoherent. A large, phallic and ugly white dovecote dominated the scene, and almost blocked one of the garden's best features, a stone wall over which water cascaded, and on which was inscribed the word "peace" in more than 40 languages, though we couldn't spot the Erse among them.