‘I have died and gone to heaven,’ the gentle-faced, fortysomething American beside me murmured into her phone. I turned and stared. Too late I remembered the instructions repeated in childhood not to stand with one’s mouth open. But I couldn’t help myself. In the glorious sun at Chelsea Flower Show, I – unlike my neighbour – felt like I had died and gone to hell.
Tuesday morning at Chelsea Flower Show is among life’s rare treats. At least, it used to be. The whoosh of excitement crossing Royal Hospital Road, where policemen marshalled crowds; the magnetic pull towards the show gardens, where the eye was dazzled by loveliness; inside the Great Pavilion, a visual assault like medieval millefleur tapestries in which every inch of dark meadow is studded with petals and leaves and bursting buds. The scent was distinctive, too: grass underfoot and showy roses. Even beyond the dawn of the phone age, older women continued to wield notebooks. Their husbands all seemed to merge, alike in their straw hats of apparently uncontrived wonkiness.
In the air was more than the smell of flowers. Sometimes, looking around, it was like watching hounds first detect a scent, noses just beginning to twitch, as these knowledgeable men and women sallied forth on Chelsea’s first day, reserved for members of the Royal Horticultural Society. Every year was much the same, delivering its treats, the same gardeners’ adrenaline rush, the same deep satisfaction at witnessing something of supreme quality undertaken seemingly for the sheer love of it.
Until Tuesday 20 May 2025 when, for me, the Flower Show castles in the air I had built over three decades of visits came crashing down. Very occasionally life delivers a disappointment so overwhelming it leaves you both defeated and staggering. For me, Tuesday was one of those moments.
A brief backtrack. As a child I had a recurring dream that I was a gardener in Louis XIV’s new gardens at Versailles. The first plant I bought myself for the garden plot my parents gave me when I was seven or eight was the small, clump-forming alpine perennial oxalis adenophylla, whose pink-flushed, trumpet-shaped flowers still seem to me lovely against its glaucous little leaves that look like decorations on old-fashioned bathing caps. In my twenties, I wrote a gardening page for House & Garden and later a biography of gardening doyenne Vita Sackville-West. I lost my wedding ring in the herbaceous border beyond my study windows, somewhere, I suspect, below a tangle of campanula lactiflora – ‘Loddon Anna’ – that I haven’t the heart to lift. Does this put you in the picture? For 30 years I’ve loved Chelsea. On Tuesday morning, not a bit of me anticipated anything but delight.
The new Chelsea is like the nastiest possible day at Bicester Village
Once upon a time, Chelsea was described as resembling a vicarage tea party. That description hasn’t quite rung true for decades. But what changed this year (or had I simply failed to notice it before, because previous year’s show gardens were less dreary?) is that the new Chelsea is like the nastiest possible day at Bicester Village. The scent in the air is not roses but acquisitiveness.
In the Great Pavilion, I could have bought the bronze-leafed rodgersia I’ve meant to plant for several seasons or, if I didn’t find them so unappealing, potted calla lilies in a range of more or less synthetic-looking colours. But outside the Pavilion was where the action really was. And what was on offer there? Secateurs and dibbers? Possibly. But if so they were lost among the stalls selling handbags and bespoke mirrors and ‘long-lasting premium doormats’ and cashmere knitwear and quilted bedcovers (no, these weren’t variants on cloches, they were for bedrooms not borders) and rocking horses and pepper mills in the shape of chess pieces. Be still, my twitching spade hand. There was even something for those who decided not to blow the budget on a glasshouse but buy a pair of earrings instead: a Boodles concession. Hurrah! At last, Chelsea Flower Show has caught up with the times. On your next visit, sod the garden and think about your own appearance instead. You won’t be alone. Many of my fellow visitors appeared to be in Chelsea Flower Show fancy dress – floral-themed I grant you – with peculiar hats that prevented them from seeing the ugliness around them.
I looked again at the RHS website and the Chelsea ticket page, curious to see how the RHS now pitches the world’s greatest flower show to punters. Chelsea, it tells us, ‘is filled with amazing garden designs, gorgeous flower displays and exclusive shopping’. Horticultural excellence, then, is no longer enough or even the point.
I telephoned a friend, a prominent and highly respected garden designer. I asked her: am I mad? Have I missed the point? Am I being stuffy? ‘I’ve stopped going to Chelsea,’ she told me.
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