Show time

Once, a long time ago, when I was a horticultural student at the RHS Gardens at Wisley, I helped to stage an exhibit of pelargoniums at the Chelsea Flower Show. That event has shone brightly in my memory ever since. Now, more than 30 years later, I am back exhibiting once more, this time helping to plan and plant a small ‘Chic’ show garden for my old college, New Hall in Cambridge.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the first time that an Oxbridge college has laid out a garden at Chelsea. Called ‘The Transit of Venus’, its theme is suitably cerebral, you will be relieved to hear; it is intended to connect early botanical and astronomical advances, and point up the college’s distinguished record in astronomy (Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars while she was a postgraduate student). The name also refers to the transitory nature of undergraduate life, in what is still a women’s college.