At 7 o'clock on a clear morning in May,
gardens look pretty good. Inside the Royal Hospital grounds, the
finest show gardens on offer are quietly shimmering at the Chelsea
Flower Show. With pale sunshine and hardly anyone around, they will
never look better than this, in their moment of judgement.
Since it's impossible to see everything
at once at the Chelsea Flower Show, the leafy nook that shelters the
Artisan Gardens is best saved until you are in need of escape from
Main Avenue. But don't forget to go; they are the most inventive and
useful gardens in the show. They're small, so people can relate, and
they're not flash. They have a story to tell, like the Potter's
Garden with WW1 bullets embedded in the soil or the Topiarist's
Garden with a bothy and cottagey parterre for indulging a head
gardener's personal topiary fetish (as if).
If you are lucky there will be a
Japanese moss garden as well, with a waterfall and lots of little
mounds. If you are REALLY lucky you'll visit with a photographer like
Howard Sooley. He'll tell you to go round the back and see what a
small show garden can do. This one had had considerable attention
paid to the sides, with a moss wall infiltrated by ferns and dangly
things. At the back: a planted wall with little acers growing out of
the top. It suited this woodland setting. And yet it was still neat:
the turf around the edge of the back of the garden was precisely cut
before giving way to real mud and weeds.
The Paradise on Earth garden won Best
in Show for the smaller gardens and as Kazuyuki Ishihara ran on stage
roaring, with both fists in the air, he and his crowd showed us a
thing or two about celebrating. After that we really wanted the
Italian winner of the Best Show Garden, Luciano Giubbilei, to
gesticulate and go a bit mad, but he's been living in England for too
long.
