THERE IS no getting away from the recession, even at the Chelsea Flower Show, where the themes this year are climate change and the new economic dispensation.
That means fewer glamorous gardens filled with architectural angles and exuberant water features, and a return to the principles of Blue Peter – using up what’s all around us.
There are garden paths paved with old keys and another scattered with broken-up CDs (the free ones from newspapers it turns out). There is even a series of mini-gardens inspired by the credit crunch, including a Bankers’ Garden which comes with a parking space that is “to let”.
Still, this is Chelsea, and London has come out blooming in support of the nation’s favourite flower show. The doorways of Tiffany and Cartier on Sloane Street are a bower of roses and hydrangeas to greet those on their way to the show.
Once inside yesterday, if you wanted to see the prize roses, too bad, first you had to dodge around a BBC film unit and a crowd of admirers vying to get the best shot. Not of the latest bloom, mind you, but of Joanna Lumley wearing a professional smile and a suitably splashy jacket.
The cameras followed her everywhere and, by the time she got to the plasticine garden, created by Top Gear’s James May, there was a forest of furry loudspeakers poised to pick up every word she had to say to the Shaggy One.
As it was the first day, the press was out in force to capture some very British celebrities. They were working to a deadline. By 3.30pm the grounds had be cleared of the hoi polloi so that her majesty the queen could have an uninterrupted tour of the show.
While it gets unbearably crowded later in the week, this first day is a delight. The flowers are bursting with freshness and there’s a holiday atmosphere, helped by the champagne being splashed – a little more sparingly this year – into plastic flutes to toast the special guests.
Bill Nighy swayed good naturedly in front of some suitably elegant grasses. Nancy Del’Olio, swaddled in pistachio green cashmere, reclined graciously for the cameras into a swing seat that was difficult to get out of.
Stephen Fry, tanned and tall in grey pinstripes, swept by with an entourage. Trevor McDonald attracted more attention than Nigel Havers. Fellow newsreader Moira Stewart was surrounded by admirers while Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen, dressed from head to toe in black, looked a little bit like yesterday’s man, though in a handsome way. It soon turns into a game of “did you see David Bellamy sitting on the ride-on mower?”, or “is that Katherine Jenkins over there?”
Scantily clad girls posed with flowers in their hair and in their teeth and on their head – but they were just for the media.
The real plants people were there to see the rare and the beautiful. Superb displays of flowers and plants gave out a heady scent.
There’s a glorious stand of clematis, a colossal display of lilies of every hue. There are tiers and tiers of cactuses, an underwater garden from the Cayman Islands, and a display of cocoa and nutmeg from plantations in Grenada. There are lupins like you will never be able to grow them, chrysanths the size of dinner plates, and hyacinths rising fragrantly from giant moss topped willow baskets.
The show gardens vary between the utterly gorgeous and the ghastly and pretentious. At the Elizabethan Rose Garden, the fragrant plants play second fiddle to a cone-shaped distillery that is busy pressing rose petals for scent. But just one squirt of scent is allowed per person in case of skin allergies, I was told.
There’s a funky street garden designed as communal space for small urban town houses, a garden designed by the Eden Project with the help of prisoners and homeless people, and another arranged around a comfy outdoor sofa scattered with cushions. Turns out that this one is sponsored by the people who make Quilted Velvet toilet paper.
The stupendous roses drew me back again and again.
“I just love Winchester Cathedral because it is sooo white,” said a character out of a PG Wodehouse novel, as he wafted under the pergola of the David Austin stand. But in these thrifty times, there was more interest in the vast and intricate displays of vegetables at the Jersey Farmers Union stand.
What treasures here – cartwheels of peppers, cauliflowers as big as your head, a bunch of leeks arranged to look like Marie Antoinette’s wig, and stunning displays of radishes. Centre stage though went to that most popular plant of the recession: the humble potato.