The peculiar magic of the English garden

The most eccentric event in the British social season is – hear me out – the Chelsea Flower Show. Though the season is a moveable feast, generally running from the Badminton Horse Trials of last fortnight to the close of Glyndebourne in late August, Chelsea tends to occupy the third week of May and is both sporting and dramatic, while having few pretensions to be either.

At the press day on Monday, the marvellous peculiarity of the event came fully to the fore. Gardeners were frantically completing the final manicures of their gardens, while a flurry of journalists, cameramen, members of the cast of Strictly Come Dancing, a scattering of dames, and veterans of the British army (the flower show takes place in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, home to the Chelsea pensioners in their brilliant red uniforms) spread out over Main Avenue and the Great Pavilion. An earlier ban on garden gnomes had been lifted, so more than a few cheery faces emerged from the soil as well.

Much of the excitement this year is for an English shrub rose launched in honour of Sir David Beckham. Though I did not spot the footballer in the crowd, I found his rose. Grown by David Austin, whose stand is always among the most spectacular at Chelsea, its flowers resemble perfectly neat cups with pale pink petals tipping to yellow. David Austin’s vibrant ‘Gabriel Oak’, ‘Emily Brontë’, and ‘Queen of Sweden’ also caught my eye – and my nose.

The combination of the serious and frivolous works far better in real life than it does on paper because it is grounded in tradition. The flower show was originally hosted by Britain’s principal gardening charity, the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society), in 1833, some way west of Chelsea, at Chiswick. Finding Chiswick too cut-off from central London, the organisers moved their ‘Great Spring Show’ to Kensington, and thence to Embankment, before settling at Chelsea in 1913.

Its association with celebrity began early. Already in the 1920s, influential local residents hosted tea parties for the rich and famous in honour of the flower show, pulling in a paparazzi-worthy crowd. Royal attendance, meanwhile, has been steady since Queen Elizabeth II first visited as an RHS patron in 1955. More cutting-edge is the arrival of the celebrity gardener. Since their first appearances on television in the 1970s, many have become household names, helped in no small part by a week-long coverage of the flower show on the BBC. Given how famous gardeners were in history – Capability Brown, Gertrude Jekyll, William Kent, Humphry Repton, André Le Nôtre – one might say that their flowering has come comparatively late.

Although the flower show is an international attraction, it feels decidedly British, and not only because some of the stands evoke memories of agricultural shows with which many Britons grow up. It took a century before the ‘Best in Show’ medal was even awarded to a non-British team. There is also something about the veneer of organisation over hidden chaos, together with the slightly dotty exuberance in the face of adversity – rain, wilt, infestation – that encapsulates the British spirit.

For many gardeners and designers, this is the most important and stressful week of the year; a gold medal from the judges will have a considerable impact upon future sponsorship. Many tears will be shed come Tuesday when the prizes are revealed. The medals are certainly more important than they used to be.

Visitors have come to expect an annual gold rush, but in the first two years of the show, only one gold medal was awarded, and that to a rock garden. The 19th-century Englishman was obsessed with rockeries. He had seen them in Europe and considered them the height of sophistication. All the way up to the 1960s, they were the prime attraction for Chelsea goers. The craze was superseded by a fascination with orchids and bonsai, but in recent decades, it has been all about the medal-hungry show gardens.

Standout shows this year include The Tate Britain Garden (soft, purple and yellow planting inspired by East Asian woodland, meandering paths, a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth), The Lady Garden (beautiful salvias, a New Zealand holly, a dramatic central structure, all designed for a gynaecological charity), the Japanese Tokonoma Garden, with its perfect, undulating moss hills and delicate iris, and The Parkinson’s UK garden, which features a meandering water-filled handrail and fiery planting giving way to calming foliage. The King’s Foundation Garden, which is excluded from the judging, is equally magnificent.

But it is in the pavilion, where electrifyingly bright and blousy begonias and delphiniums raise their heads over elegant peonies, that the true Blitz Spirit is still felt. An original single tent for plants became many after the First World War, and many more after the Second World War. During the wartime years, when the shows were suspended, tents were used for makeshift hospitals; one can only imagine how bittersweet it must have been to find them filled – in post-war defiance – with such beauty. The tents were replaced in 1951 by a marquee which, in covering an unprecedented 1.5 hectares, earned the festival a longstanding place in the Guinness Book of Records. The canvas was recycled into aprons and handbags when the marquee was disassembled in 2000. Today’s pavilion, though slightly smaller, carries with it the weight of its history.

The cameras will rightly be trained on the designers and growers this week while they mastermind the mad orchestration of nature that participating in a flower show entails. And after all the ferrying of plants between greenhouses and cold storage, all the tactics to delay blooms and ward off frosts, all the vying of gardeners for gold and pre-eminence, the gardens shall be packed away and the ground levelled to nothing. At 4 pm on Friday, a bell will be rung and the plants offered up for sale or for charity and rehoming. It will be as if it never happened.