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. The layout echoes the architecture of the college and its exuberantly colourful gardens. Interestingly, many of those closely involved — garden designer, architect, journalists and photographer — studied at New Hall; and all the sponsorship (including that of the iconic Fitzbillies bakery, which is sending us Chelsea buns daily while we put the garden together) has come from local East Anglian companies.

Show gardenmakers are naturally motivated by the knowledge that exhibiting at Chelsea raises their public profile. But —and this was apparent to me long before this year — there is much more to it than that. There is such a thing as a Chelsea spirit, which affects all exhibitors. Many of the New Hall team are volunteers, spurred on by an attachment to their old college and the knowledge that it needs endlessly to raise money to fund bursaries and the like, but everyone involved is doing far more than is strictly required of them.