Show stopper

You have probably idly wondered, as you stood in a queue for the loos at Chelsea Flower Show, why the Royal Horticultural Society stages its greatest flower show of the year in the week before the Whitsun Bank Holiday. Late May is good for irises, Oriental poppies, alliums, hardy geraniums, seed-raised verbascums, lilacs, wisteria and viburnums, but it is too late for tulips and too early for roses and most summer perennials. That is why so many of the plants seen at Chelsea have either been forced into premature growth or retarded.

It becomes clear if you know that Chelsea used to be called the Great Spring Show, in the days when the RHS was mainly run by gardeners with woodland gardens on acid soils in the south and west. It was, therefore, first and foremost, a rhododendron and azalea show, with rock gardens as a subsidiary interest. You would not know that now.