If you’d read the advance coverage of this week’s Chelsea Flower Show, you might be forgiven for thinking the entire event had been choked by bindweed, dandelions and nettles. Yes, there are some show gardens that use plants commonly called ‘weeds’ as part of their designs, but the show gardens this year really aren’t radically different to the traditional Chelsea model. And regardless of the planting choices, there are some real gems to be seen.
The highlights
The RHS’s Best in Show award went to Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg’s magnificent Horatio’s Garden design. This is the eighth garden provided by the charity to hospital spinal injuries units across the country, and the first full show garden that it has sponsored. So it has a story behind it and an important brief: to create a wheelchair- and hospital bed-accessible sensory garden that real people can enjoy as they come to terms with a life-changing injury. Often gardens with ‘stories’ behind them can end up being so much about a theme that they are removed from reality: this garden can’t do that. It has tactile plants, water feature and stone cairns. The best of the trees is a Betula nigra – a particularly flaky-barked birch that looks striking and feels even better if you run your hands over the papery surface.
My own personal best in show, though, is Sarah Price’s mesmerising Nurture Landscapes garden. Price, known for her naturalistic planting, was inspired by the paintings and iris breeding work of Cedric Morris. The irises that she has planted throughout the plot are the stars of this warmly-coloured garden and show the value of relying on the same plant throughout rather than a scattergun approach. She has chosen a number of cultivars that Morris bred himself at Benton End, ‘Benton Olive’ and ‘Benton Lorna’ being two of the most striking, with apricot, yellow and purple tones. The terracotta-coloured straw bale rendered walls have Rosa mutabilis and Wisteria sinensis trained on them, with a dark accent from Aeonium just in front. It is an unusual garden, one that visitors really lingered over in the golden evening sunlight during my visit.
What didn’t work
Chelsea isn’t just about the plants, but the daring structures in the designs, too. Not all of these worked. The Memoria and GreenAcres Transcendence garden by Gavin McWilliam and Andrew Wilson was supposed to offer a more beautiful end-of-life experience than a crematorium, with a cantilevered canopy with a water feature that, according to the design notes, ‘slips away as a delicate film to create a sense of continued movement into the unknown’. The planting in this garden was exquisite – a mix of topiarised yew and herbaceous perennials such as Centranthus, Asphodel and white foxgloves, all under a tight planting of honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) trees. But the structure looming above it wasn’t so much a beautiful metaphor as faintly menacing.
Even less appealing was a too-clever-by-half glass viewing platform than stuck out rather sorely over the Cavernoma on My Mind sanctuary garden by Taina Suonio and Anne Hamilton. It didn’t fit into the wider garden, or indeed into the mural on the steps leading up to it, which featured a cavernoma – a lesion made up of abnormal blood vessels – and a red cross with hands clutching one another. Many of the plants were supposed to resemble cavernomas, which meant the overall scheme wasn’t very coherent.
What about the weeds?
Some designers made weeds centre stage: Tom Massey’s garden for the Royal Entomological Society (pictured at the top of the page) has dandelions in prominent places, for instance. They don’t look out of place, though, because this is a highly naturalistic garden. What is more striking about Massey’s planting scheme is that it incorporates so many other plants that we generally call ‘weeds’, including teasels, cow parsley, viper’s bugloss and meadow buttercups, alongside non-native sages, lavenders, thymes and so on. The garden smells amazing in the warm May sunshine as the latter plants release their essential oils. But it was easier for Massey to use ‘weeds’ because this was clearly a wildlife garden. Similarly, Cleve West’s Centrepoint garden had dandelions and nettles, with free-flowing and naturalistic herb robert.
The RSPCA sanctuary garden (a smaller plot than the show gardens) by Martyn Wilson also included buttercups and other natives next to benches that served as dead hedges and hedgehog hotels – but once again, you’d expect that from a garden that was so explicitly about wildlife. What would be even more interesting might be a designer prepared to use native wildflowers in an even more nonchalant way but in a more formal plan.
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