Raking up the past

The best enterprises look to the future but honour their past, which is why it was encouraging that the Royal Horticultural Society should last week have returned to the Inner Temple gardens to hold a show, almost a century after the last time it did so. The Great Spring Show was staged there from 1888 to 1911, until it outgrew the site and moved to the Chelsea Hospital grounds where it has remained ever since. This year’s show, a ‘Floral Celebration’, was appropriately enough, supported by the City firm of solicitors, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and it attracted 16,000 people over three days.

Its staging should have cheered all those who think the Society has become a little careless of its two-day London Flower Shows in recent times. These have been held for over a century in the two halls the Society owns in Westminster, but their number has recently been cut from eight to four a year — as a result, the Society says, of falling visitor numbers and logistical difficulties for exhibitors.