Weeding out the woke poseurs from the real gardeners at Chelsea

Just as the Wimbledon fortnight inspires lapsed tennis players to pick up their rackets, the Chelsea Flower Show unearths the nation’s inner gardeners.

I had two in my house this week, three if you count my husband, and as I, a non-gardener, listened and observed, I was struck by the difference between an arriviste horticulturist and the real thing.

On one couch sat my sister-in-law who knows her hostas from her helianthuses and is green-fingered to the tips of her (often chipped) nails. On the other, sat a dear friend who joined the Royal Horticultural Society so he could gain entry to the Chelsea Flower Show, the most high-profile social event in the gardening calendar.

As they swapped know-how about garlic spraying against slugs and planting bulb “lasagne”, it soon became clear who was the expert and who sounded convincing on account of his polytunnel but didn’t appreciate the finer points of Pelargonium Grandiflora (although even he knew my husband had poisoned the geraniums by burying them in organic compost).

Everyone wants a garden now, an age-old aspiration boosted recently by lockdowns and park bans, but do they know what to do with them once in possession?

We have been lucky enough to have acquired gardens along with successive homes, and lucky, too, that we have inherited mature plots established by experienced gardeners.

Currently, we even have a conservatory, where I hope to put to good use the tips I picked up during a holiday job many years ago in the Queen’s greenhouses in Windsor. I had to water the mushrooms and sign the Official Secrets Act.

In our last garden in Edinburgh, we also inherited neighbours who were the Percy Throwers of the street, whose lawn gleamed, whose herbaceous borders blazed and whose vegetables prospered.

Their garden was, in fact, so perfect, so undemanding, that they turned their attention to ours, the only blot on the landscape.

One year when we went on holiday, they offered to pop in to “tidy things up” and we returned, two weeks later, to discover our wilderness pruned back to the bark, the greenness gone and the cats’ littering spot graphically exposed beneath the kitchen window.

Little did these kindly folk know then that our taste for dishevelment would one day become de rigueur among the gardening beau monde, with a mattered mess of an exhibit winning top honours this year at Chelsea.

The Rewilding Britain garden was beaver themed, flower free and, despite its creators’ denials, overtly political. We have seen Chelsea steadily commercialised over the years, but this year, and this garden, cemented the continued politicisation of the occasion.

It is part of a budding trend that last autumn, at a quasi, post-pandemic Chelsea, brought us the Cop26 garden, highlighting “negative practices” (which apparently include paved over front gardens and monoculture lawns) and encouraging a more sustainable approach to meet climate change targets.

How joyless it sounded and how pointlessly finger-wagging; seasoned gardeners have long been eco custodians since people who are at one with nature tend not to attempt to destroy it. 

The rewilding garden represents a new departure, though. Its winning team, Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, who designed their garden for the charity Rewilding Britain, spoke of the “massively important message about the extinction crisis and species decline, and how we can repair that using nature”.

Why not exploit the Chelsea Flower Show to publicise a campaign, but beavers are controversial, as loathed by farmers — who have lost crops to land degraded by the rodents — as they are loved by rewilding obsessives. Introducing them to the flower show, though not literally, is a political act.

Gardening is in danger of growing into a movement, hijacked by poseurs with ulterior motives, and increasingly removed from the traditional skills of cultivation.

The journalist Ed Cumming wrote this week that when he first went to the Chelsea Flower Show 11 years ago, as the Daily Telegraph’s deputy gardening editor, “only a handful of gardens came with a moral”.

Now, activism is replacing artistry and the real gardeners risk being driven away, or even underground.

But there is still enough to lure the hardy annuals. My sister-in-law, a Chelsea Flower Show regular since the 1980s, goes to see what new plants are being showcased and to pick up ideas from the best designers.

For every Bob Flowerdew or Keith Weed (the RHS president, surely not picked for his name), there are hordes of hobbyists in SW3 in May, just as there are across the country year-round, both the bordering on professional and the common garden variety.

What they share is the thrill of nurturing new life from seeds, the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of their patient labour, the pleasure of working within a natural habitat, and a passion for the outdoors. Gardening is their cause and they need no other. Long may they bloom.