Is Chelsea a Flower Show?

I may be about to commit horticultural heresy. The exhibitors at Chelsea Flower Show have wowed us with blooms grown to perfection and colour combinations to die for. We have fallen in love all over again with lupins, and drooled over myriad pinks, roses and delphiniums, but for me, once I have had my fill of beautiful flowers, the little bit of Chelsea I take home and try to apply to my own patch involves the quiet, unsung hero of flower shows: foliage. 

Flowers in Janine Crimmins' Very English Garden

Yes, I know the clue is in the name. It’s not called Chelsea Flower Show for nothing, but I wish that it could be the Chelsea Plant Show because the use of foliage is top-class. I also think that the exquisite hard landscaping should get a shout-out, as alluded to in Andrew O’Brien's excellent Gardens, Weeds and Words*, but the Chelsea Plant and Hard Landscaping Show hardly rolls off the tongue.

Chris Beardshaw's garden for NSPCC

The first-rate use of foliage in Tom Stuart-Smith's celebration of 60 years of The Weston Garden and Robert Barker’s Skin Deep Garden will live long in my memories of Chelsea 2018. Good foliage, well combined, is a feast for the eyes (and admittedly, caterpillars, rabbits, and deer, but let us not forget that flowers have their troubles too). Of course, everything is as perfect as it can be at a show. I have yet to see a hungry bunny or a ravenous deer at Chelsea, let alone a gluttonous sawfly.

Tom Stuart-Smith's Weston Garden

Leaves are workhorses. They are photosynthesis powerhouses that retire from their working lives by falling from the plant and removing waste, before rotting down to produce precious leafmould. In short, they are excretophores, which doesn't sound terribly glamorous, but leaves are capable of doing it with such panache. After all, people travel miles to admire pre-waste-disposal autumn
leaf colour. 

Robert Barker's Skin Deep Garden

Long after we’ve finished swooning over fleeting peonies, foliage will still be quietly doing its job and earning its keep in our borders. Thoughtful foliage planting can create a beautiful textural tapestry. Combine it with striking bark, and you have the recipe for a heavenly display that will continue long after the flowers have finished showing off.

Robert Barker

It might seem strange for someone besotted with wildlife to focus on foliage at a flower show instead of pollinator-friendly blooms, but where would the flowers be without  leaves? Beautifully mingling foliage combinations linger longer than purely floral planting. Leaves help to rest the eye and make an excellent foil for showier plants, all while providing valuable ground cover for wildlife and helping to suppress weeds.

Tom Stuart-Smith

Designing with foliage is not just for the ornamental garden. Creative planting may be used in the vegetable patch to great effect. Just think of the combination of corn, beans and squash in Three Sisters planting, or take a look at Mark Gregory's Welcome to Yorkshire garden at Chelsea. Why shouldn’t vegetables feed the eye as well as the belly?  

The Chelsea Flower Show is a place for perfection and dreams. While those at the Saturday sell-off may find themselves sharing a tube carriage with ramrod straight delphiniums, the rest of us leave with more portable souvenirs. In my case, it is a camera filled with inspiring foliage combinations. While foliage 
might not steal the show, its impact is huge. Chelsea is so much more than just a flower show.

*http://www.gardensweedsandwords.com/gwwblog/rhs-chelsea-flower-show-2018-1

Something Old and Something New for Bees

I've been a busy old blogger, and I'm feeling terribly ashamed that my blog has been forced to take a back seat while I run around willy-nilly, doing other stuff. I have missed being part of this wonderful community and I'm very happy to be back. There will be a longer, more photo-packed post later in the week, but in the meantime, if you would be kind enough to click on the link, you will find a piece about wonderful pollinator-friendly flowers at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2018. I hope you enjoy it. 

http://www.hardy-plant.org.uk/blog/shoe-0518

Crazy paving, Skirret and a spot of Hugelkultur at RHS Hampton Court

Aeons ago, when I was six, crazy paving was de rigueur. Since then it has gone the way of Aubrieta and my all-time favourite boiled sweets, Spangles. While Aubrieta is enjoying a return to being a cool, must-have plant, I am still awaiting the resurrection of my beloved Spangles (my dentist is probably crying into her mouthwash at their sad demise and the resulting loss of income).

Memories of Childhood... rose gardens

As for crazy paving, if I were a betting gardener, I would say that we are on the cusp of a revival. For this we should thank Andy Sturgeon and his cleverly conceived RHS Hampton Court Show garden incorporating iconic elements from a decade of Chelsea show gardens. He has rummaged through other designers' sheds to find ex-Chelsea seating, paving, columns and fins to reuse (which makes my shed seem woefully dull with its clapped-out washing machine, a few sorry plastic plant labels, and the national collection of unpaired gardening gloves). Reliving memories of Chelseas past is fun, but even better is the beautiful modern take on crazy paving. It makes me want to smash up and relay my perfectly linear patio.

As we step back in time down our crazy paving paths, let us spare a thought for colour. Flower shows in the twenty-first century have flirted with a tasteful splash of orange, or a sprinkling of lemon in a sea of blues, whites and greens. The planting at RHS Hampton Court embraces colour clashes and reintroduces estranged sections of the colour wheel to one another in a glorious celebration of dazzling flamboyance. 

Tom Massey's giant colour wheel design

Charlie Bloom's Colour Box Garden sums this up perfectly. The garden exists because of the generosity of the Twitter community. Gardeners have always shared plants, knowledge, expertise and skill, and the Colour Box Garden is proof that this culture of generosity lives on in a new, broader-reaching twenty-first-century form.

Colour Box Garden

Relinquishing control and letting nature take its course does not sit comfortably with some gardeners, but it is at the heart of London Glades, a garden created using Hugelkultur, the ancient process of mounding up garden waste and rotting wood to mimic the rich environment of the forest floor. The plants in the garden are all edible, from skirret to Stachys affinis and there is a genuine sense of calm in this space. It is like escaping to a time long ago - the time that existed before crazy paving, colour, and Spangles. Hang on, was there a time before Spangles? Oh our poor, poor ancestors.

London Glades

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show is open until July 9th. For more details visit https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-hampton-court-palace-flower-show

Dame Judi Dench and the Great Garden Conundrum

When is a garden not a garden? It might sound like the set-up to a very bad joke, but it is a question I have been chewing over ever since I decided to undertake a major overhaul of my compacted soil by hand (a tiring and tedious task which gives me biceps of iron and too much time to think). Usually boredom costs the earth because I have a tendency to daydream and my reveries are inevitably expensive. This time though, I haven't had a chance to ponder ideas of massive mortgage-sized proportions and for this we must thank Dame Judi Dench. 

I took the photo above in Norwich. Is it a garden? It looks and smells like one, but if you peer beyond the carefully crafted borders and behind the willow hurdles you will glimpse reality.

It is a film set. The lawns in the Norwich Cathedral Cloisters were remodelled for Tulip Fever with Dame Judi Dench, Christoph Waltz and Cara Delevingne. So is this a garden? Many of us grow plants in pots. Often these plants are temporarily sited and were we to suffer from indecision and a surplus of spare time, they could be moved every day of the year. So is a container garden a garden? How different are the temporary plant arrangements in the Cathedral Cloisters from those pots of half-hardy annuals we plop into borders to plug a gap?

It is intriguing to experience the effect that a garden/film set can have on a place. Certainly the Cloisters felt more romantic, which is just as well since Tulip Fever is a romance. It is set in the seventeenth century, so leaf blowers are out and draw-droppingly beautiful props are in.   

Isn't it strange how some gardening paraphernalia is a delight? Lengths of hosepipe hissing hither and thither do not fill my heart with joy. The number of Chelsea Flower Show gardens with hosepipes strewn across them this year was shocking. Tickets aren’t cheap and visitors deserve better. Yes, I know plants need water, but a few years ago, when I was allowed entry prior to opening, I saw gardens being watered before the paying public arrived.  

I do not have a problem with the act of watering plants during the show. A person with a watering can constitutes the ever-delightful gardener gardening which viewing gardeners love to see. It is less intrusive as the person will be out of the picture in under a minute and it is encouraging to see a designer taking care of the plants. Here, Luciano Giubbilei with his watering can and a cloth for spillages gives his lupins a drink in his gold medal-winning, Best in Show garden. He really did mop up after himself, taking garden care to a new level (if indeed a show garden is in fact a garden). 

Which brings me back to my original question. Naturally, I sought help from The Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t want to bore you with long definitions, so you will doubtless be relieved to learn that The OED defines a garden as "A piece of ground adjoining a house, used for growing flowers, fruit, or vegetables."

Brilliant! So if that area in front of your house, commonly known as your front garden, is laid to lawn with the occasional tree, it is not a garden since trees and lawns have no part to play in The OED’s definition! Strangely enough, the Tulip Fever set fulfils more of The OED's requirements of a garden than the tree/lawn combination. I wish the people at The Oxford English Dictionary would pull their fingers out and find us a decent definition of a garden to get our teeth into. In the meantime, I am going to chew up the noun, embrace the verb and get out into this...

Is it a garden? It has a handful of flowers, fruit and veg and adjoins a house, so according to The OED it is! Plenty of words spring to mind when I look at it, but garden isn't one of them. It's time I got back to digging out the claypan from hell and started daydreaming...

Chelsea Flower Show - the hot colour for 2013

Something feisty and demanding has infiltrated the Chelsea Flower Show this year. From paving to plants, it has given a warm glow to the event. It may have been a surprisingly subtle return for a loud colour, but orange is most definitely back.

Paul Hervey-Brookes uses Geum 'Prinses Juliana' and Carex flagellifera 'Auburn Cascade' in his design for Brand Alley (above), picking out the colour in the wall. He isn't the only designer to embrace the warmth; the WaterAid artisan garden is ablaze with marigolds.

Elsewhere, orange is used in a more understated way. Here, in Ulf Nordfjell's garden for Laurent-Perrier, the warm colour of the travertine stone is picked up in Lilium 'Orange Marmalade' and Iris 'Beverly Sills'. 

In Chris Beardshaw's garden for Arthritis Research UK,  Eschscholzia californica unfurl alongside Iris 'Supreme Sultan' (which will soon be showing its true colours - deep orange and purple). 

Stoke-on-Trent's show garden has a palette focussing on orange, apricot and copper.

In Scape Design's garden, After the Fire, the contrast between the orange pool, terracotta seats, the vivid green new leaves and the charred tree trunks is striking.

Even that 1970's must-have orange toy, the Space Hopper, made a comeback   (I spotted two) - this one is in the NSPCC garden.

Orange can be a difficult colour to use in the garden because it clashes so readily with other colours and is so demanding of our attention. Some people find this quality stimulating; others find it too challenging. Used well, it can link plants, hard landscaping and buildings together. Its propensity to clash with other colours such as strong, hot pinks can be exciting, yet it can be used more subtly to enhance bronze foliage. 

Chris Beardshaw's Arthritis Research UK garden

It may be challenging, but a twist of orange really can lift a planting scheme. It certainly worked its magic at Chelsea this year. 

Rabbiting on

As a fully paid-up member of the ‘do as I say and not as I do’ brigade*, heeding my own advice is about as natural as the sweet heady scent of freshly mown astro turf. However, miracles can happen - even in twenty-first century Norfolk.

In all honesty, I would rather spend my garden budget on something exquisite which pleases as many of my senses as is physically possible, so anything humdrum and sensible, like rabbit fencing, is way down my list of desirable purchases. Or it was. I have been preaching to clients about correctly installed rabbit protection for years and I have finally heard my own message.

Of course, lists of rabbit-resistant plants are readily available, but Br'er, Peter, Roger and Buggs haven’t read any of them and will invariably munch their way through specimens which are, according to the experts, off the menu.

I love to grow my own food and if I eat the food, the chances are that the rabbits will too and I know who is more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning and will get to the crops first. So a considerable proportion of my garden budget will be blown on rabbit fencing which will, hopefully, keep the bunnies out. I like to think it will be a fine long-term investment for my plants and my sanity. After all, little is more disheartening than discovering that your garden is now the eatery of choice for the entire cast of Watership Down.

The photos above are of my auntie's travelling Geum. I took some from her Cambridgeshire garden, planted it in Essex, then moved a little of it with me to Norfolk. It's a spreader, so it travels within the garden too, although not in a pesky way - just enough to enable us to share it with others. It is Geum rivale. I think it is beautiful and even better, bees love it.

Our barn conversion continues apace. Tonnes of soil have been removed and the barn is still standing despite howling gales and hailstorms.

We have had many heaps of soil bigger than the one below (although this one is unusual in that it is basking in the sunlight). We have managed to reuse them all, so nothing has been disposed of off-site.

The dog enjoying his morning constitutional is Sprout. I can't believe how clean he looks in that photo!

This week it is Chelsea Flower Show, so my camera battery is recharging and I am getting all excited about catching up with old friends and meeting new plants. I can't wait!

* Please see the 'Chocolate and Cherries' post March 2012