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by Graham Rice
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| Chelsea is a great place for spotting the latest hot horticultural ideas and this year there's a real surprise. Who'd have thought that we'd be talking about gardens without flowers? |
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Where have all the flowers gone?
I've been spending time every day talking to visitors on the Evening Standard's Gold Medal-winning garden. Coming in the London Gate they'd walked past four gardens with hardly a flower to be seen by the time they reached Arabella Lennox-Boyd's sparkling borders - and they fell upon them with joy. Even visitors who'd seen all the gardens said they were amazed how few actual flowers there are. There's stone, there's a parterre, there are lawns and paving and decking - there are even ornamental vegetables… but not many flowers. Quite something for Chelsea.
But this is something that will be entirely ignored by the nation's gardeners - believe me, gardeners like flowers, and if the designers disagree it will be the designers who come round in the end. |
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| Now, I'm not going to say that there are no flowers in the Marquees either, but there are certainly fewer of the traditional cottagey exhibits we all love than there have been in recent years. Channel Four's Carol Klein has created a lovely informal Gold Medal-winning garden of perennials for her nursery, Glebe Cottage Plants, but there's far more tropical plants in lavish exhibits than before. |
The tropics upon us
With tropical plants, Chelsea is in tune with gardeners, who are increasingly experimenting with plants from warmer regions or even tough plants that give the garden a tropical look. The whole concept of "The Garden of the Night", from His Highness Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahayan is based on the fact that our climate is getting warmer and that we can now use our gardens more extensively in the evening and at night. And Capel Manor College from Enfield have based their exhibit around the way climate change is influencing the choice of plants for our gardens. |
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Trendy colours
But what about colours and materials…? Blue and purple are this year's colours. There's a wall of blue glass bricks, there's dramatic blue pipework, there are mulches of blue glass chips. In plants it's purple, and especially alliums - ornamental onions to the uninitiated. Like big purple drumsticks they're everywhere, including, in the marquee, a whole stand featuring hundreds of them - and nothing else.
Silver metal is king
Brushed and galvanised steel is also much in evidence. Following Sir Terence Conran's garden last year in which he showed vegetables in galvanised planters, these have reappeared in a different form on the Cabbages and Kings garden; they're on sale in a number of stands, and galvanised and brushed aluminium chairs are displayed on furniture stands all over the show. And silvery metallic trim keeps peeping out from under plants on every corner. |
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Web-influence
Finally, of course, it's the Internet. Aside from e-garden's unique 'order the plants on the stand online' approach, the Royal Horticultural Society has re-launched its own website at the show, a small garden design site has built its own garden, one of the courtyard gardens depicts an online home office outdoors, and the Evening Standard's ThisisLondon.com has more Chelsea coverage than ever before. And for the first time ever, every Show Garden and Marquee Exhibit is being completely covered on the Web - and this comprehensive coverage is being brought to you only by e-garden, of course. |
The whole world is coming
Quite how much this all means to one rapidly increasing group of visitors remains to be seen, for there are more visitors from overseas than ever before. And maybe that's the Internet too.They enjoy the spectacle, but for the marquee exhibitors this is not a trend they'de like to see develop. Many of them depend on mail order sales and how many visitors from Australia or Brazil are going to order a dozen alliums or a Japanese maple to be sent home? Not very many. |
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Photos: Top - Arabella Lenox Boyd's Evening Standard garden. 2nd: Sheikh's Evening Garden. 3rd: Alliums in purple and blue. 4th: Online office garden. Photos copyright by judywhite/GardenPhotos.com
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