What's it like to help Diarmuid Gavin build a show garden? Jane Powers finds out from three women who volunteered to go to London
Glitz. Glamour. Royals. Celebrities. Women in flowery frocks. Men in straw boaters. Sensational candy-coloured, perfumed plant displays. And gardens: fabulously flamboyant and phantasmagorically over-the-top horticultural stage sets - petal-perfect, flawlessly-foliaged feats of landscaping, the likes of which will never be seen in your backyard or mine. This, of course, is Chelsea Flower Show. Or, rather, it's the spectacle that you and I are presented with on television or strive to see while battling with the crowds - 157,000 visitors over five days - in the 11-acre grounds of London's Royal Hospital.
But for another group of people there is a different Chelsea Flower Show: mountains of soil needing moving back and forth (and back again); hundreds of plants wanting watering, planting and manicuring, then unplanting and replanting; problems to be solved in a minute; lorry queues to be sat in for an hour. It's a flurry of time marked by vanishing wheelbarrows, wayward hoses, puddles of mud, aching muscles, missed dinners, too many bodies on site, too few bodies on site, and lots and lots of cups of tea.
The people for whom this is the experience are those who build the gardens, those who make the magic out of the muck. We don't normally hear much about them, as it is the designers who receive all the attention. But a new Irish book tells the story of the making of one of this year's better-known show gardens. Off to Chelsea with Diarmuid is written by Nicki Matthews, Jackie Ball and Valarie Duffy, three Dubliners who volunteered to help with Diarmuid Gavin's Hanover Quay Garden last May, and by George Dunnington, a 60-something professional gardener from Yorkshire who supervised the volunteers.
There were 15 volunteers, winnowed from 1,200 hopefuls who contacted Marian Finucane's programme on RTÉ Radio 1. The successful candidates paid their own way to come to Chelsea in groups of five, each quintet working for four intense days alongside a professional construction crew before passing on the baton to the next batch - weary, battered and bruised but exhilarated.
Matthews, a conservation architect, was in the first lot of Irish workers. When she arrived, the nine-by-23-metre (30ft-by-75-ft) site was dominated by a rusty ship's container, waiting to be covered with cladding and soil. This was to form an important sloping bank at the end of the garden, as well as an "underground" entrance. As an architect, she was baffled by the lack of plans: no working drawings, no blueprints, just an artist's impression of the garden. Garden makers, she realised, rely more on "the use of 3D images and an experienced eye rather than the exact setting out of measurements".
The garden, Gavin's fourth and finest Chelsea effort, was a swooping landscape where bone-white "pods" nestled in a beauteous, meadowlike planting of box spheres and lavender. Shell-pink polished paths appeared to float just above the ground, and all was reflected in a glossy black granite wall. It was courageous in its simplicity. But despite its lack of apparent formality, its success depended on getting the levels and contours exactly right and on positioning the plants with precision.
By the time Matthews left, "the clay had been removed and brought back and forth from one end of the site to the other several times". It was heavy clay: "quite yellow, terribly sticky, and once walked upon . . . [ it] set like rock". But she was pleased that the bank had finally been constructed and that the pods - like "very large ostrich eggs" - had arrived and been laid down gently and swathed in polythene in the building site that would soon be a garden.
Ball, a ceramics artist who came with the next group, had been keen to get to Chelsea for years. "My parents went once, and my dad said it was like walking against the crowd at Croke Park on All-Ireland finals day. He couldn't see anything." The only way to experience the show properly, she felt, would be "either to go on press day or to make one of the gardens".
She worked hard for her privilege, while Gavin and his project manager attempted again and again to achieve the right levels. "We moved tons and tons of soil, shovelling it from one end to the other - and then they'd say: 'No, put it back down the other end.' " Finally, when one of the other workers, exasperated, asked Gavin what was going on, the designer answered: "We could leave it like this, and it could be a good garden. But if we get it right, it could be a great garden, because we'll have the drama."
During the soil shifting, 800 pots of lavender arrived from France. A place had been cleared for them on site - which can't have been easy. Space is tight in the Royal Hospital's grounds: experienced designers such as Gavin may stagger plant deliveries, so that one lot is already positioned when the next arrives. (Building a Chelsea garden is like assembling a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with time being the added dimension.)
The lavender, parched from its journey, needed watering, although it was bucketing with rain. While wielding the hose, Ball noticed and marvelled at designer Chris Beardshaw's choice of plants in the neighbouring plot. "He had that weedy pink thing [ red valerian] that grows in my walls at home. I didn't like it at all," she says indignantly, then catches herself and laughs. "You see, now I'm the garden expert."
Duffy, a keen gardener, was in the final bunch of Irish volunteers; she considers herself lucky to have been there for the planting phase. But Dunnington, who had helped select the lucky 15 during the making of a children's garden at Kildarton House, in Glenageary, had noticed her planting skills then. "That's when I knew Val had to go to Chelsea," he writes in his section of the book.
Duffy speaks with a plantswoman's voice, describing the species used in the key areas, including the vegetable plants that arrived carefully packed in foam, as if they were fine china. She explains the dipping and rising "washing-line effect" that Gavin was aiming for in his sweep of lavender and box, and she reveals that here, as in many show gardens, almost all the plants remained in their pots, the rims disguised by foliage and cleverly arranged compost.
Her dedication (and that of the other writers) is evident, as is her gratitude to have been included in the adventure. Yet the truth is that the feel-good aspect of the project was hugely enhanced by this band of generous and devoted workers. They wreathed the garden in a garland of goodwill - for which any designer would be grateful.
Off to Chelsea with Diarmuid, by Valarie Duffy, Jackie Ball, Nicki Matthews and George Dunnington, with a foreword by Diarmuid Gavin, is published by TownHouse Dublin, €12.99. All royalties go to Kildarton House, which provides services for children with intellectual disabilities