Just Stop Oil’s Chelsea Flower Show protest is a new low

You have to sink low, very low, to target the Chelsea Flower show for an environmental protest. But the boys and girls of Just Stop Oil are, it seems, up for tormenting even the most blameless and benign element of society: gardeners.

One of the show gardens, designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, was sprayed with orange powder. I’m not sure what was its offence. Hervey Brooks can’t have been sponsored by Shell. Maybe there’s a clue in what one of the protesters shouted before being marched off by security: ‘What’s the use of a garden if you can’t eat?’.

Well, I agree that this particular garden wasn’t big on fruit and veg. It seemed purely ornamental to me. But if the Just Stop oil people had included a single gardener, they might have discerned a connection between gardening and eating – that is to say that gardeners don’t merely grow flowers; most of them also turn their hands to fruit and veg.