Morning:
8°c
Chelsea is one of the great barometers of Englishness. Our love affair with “heritage”, the clumsy first grapplings with modernity, an eco- and then a grow-your-own enthusiasm: all have made their pitch here. But for the last 20 years or so, the dominant idea in the show gardens has been that beauty is chic, sheeny and pricey.
Money gardening has swept the field, and winning Chelsea gardens have tended to look like burnished cars — every detail in place, every corner buffed, that just-out-of-the-showroom look. Perfect paving, a modernist pavilion somewhere towards the back, all with a price tag to match.
Top Chelsea gardens cost about the same as supercars. It is said that there is not much change out of £400,000 from the most expensive this year (The Daily Telegraph Garden).
It hasn't always been like that. Peter Pashley of the Birmingham Evening Post was at his 42nd Chelsea yesterday, feeling nostalgic for the time (the mid-Sixties, he thought) when “Beth Chatto made low hills and small rises, when it was all about the plants.” Nowadays that sounds like the sort of place Andy Pandy would have played in. It might as well be the Bronze Age.
But the credit crunch has struck. The show this year feels like a balloon left over from the party the night before last. The air has leaked out; the great Grand Fiesta of the gardening year is not quite all it should be.
There have been withdrawals, including Notcutts, always one of the mainstays. Late last autumn, sponsors abandoned gardens they had already committed to, leaving growers without the second instalment of their fees and a mountain of plants on their hands. The result is something that seems a little shrunken. Walk around the stands in the great marquee and you can see anxiety in the eyes of the business people whose shop window this is.
There are two beautiful gardens that remain from the great money days: the Telegraph, designed by the Swede Ulf Nordfjell, in which perfect plants recline against granite slabs. It exudes a miraculous serenity and strength. Nordfjell claims to have been inspired by the great English cottage garden tradition, but if so this is Sissinghurst reconceived by Saab.
Next to it is the Italianate Laurent Perrier garden designed by Luciano Giubbilei. Most of it is clipped box, yew and hornbeam. Tightly corseted beds are filled with a density of tapestry colours that are so sophisticated they look dead.
None of the other gardens comes anywhere near these two, but even they look like dinosaurs, gas-guzzlers in a post-guzzle world. For something truer, better, more innocent, go inside the grand marquee.
There, needless to say, you will find the eccentricities: Bill Turnbull, Vince Cable and two girls dressed as bees, all promoting honey. Alan Titchmarsh in unfamiliar blue pinstripes (jacket lined in lilac satin), sharp creases, and large numbers of BBC people holding ropes to keep us away from him.
But that is not the heart of it, because the marquee holds the stands of the nurserymen — the people who, heroically, over months and years, grow and nurture the plants on which the whole, toppling, expensive, pretentious pyramid of froth rests.
Here you will find a roundabout of giant lilies, each perfect and called things like Muscadet and True Emotion.
Here you will find Three Counties Nurseries from Marshwood in Dorset, with their beautiful aquilegias, none more perfect than the exquisite White Admiral, which looks like a flock of butterflies turned into flowers. Here also are the mysterious adherents of the Carnivorous Plant Society.
Here are Neil and Sue Huntley from Hartside Nursery, near Alston in Cumbria (the highest nursery in England, at 1,050 feet, motto “Plants with Altitude”) with their wonderful tall black Fritillaria camschatcensis Black Form, and the speckly scarlet and white petals of the towering Saxifraga Southside Seedling.
Here are W&S Lockyer, with their auricula theatre, and some of the most beautiful plants I have ever seen: a bronze flower called Lincoln Chestnut, one called Moneymoon — the palest of lemon yellows seen at dawn — and another called Chloe, flecked green and black like oxidized copper.
Outside, there is the ridiculous tat: a willow tree made entirely of copper, a garden made of plasticine, pairs of 10ft wyverns for your gate posts. But in the marquee there is real love and expertise, done for more than money, and a tradition which is long and deep and needs cherishing.
Like the rest of the country, Chelsea has been wandering down the primrose path of “expense and champagne”, as gardener Monty Don said to me, for too long.
“Now there is something unsure about it, unconfident, frozen,” Don said. “Now the bankers and the nonsense has gone, or are going, and the heroic nurserymen, who have been neglected over the years, are starting to be seen again for what they are. But where is the exuberance? The sense of delight?”
Chelsea needs to rediscover what it is, and this year might be a beginning.
