Show time
Ursula Buchan
Once, a long time ago, when I was a horticultural student at the RHS Gardens at Wisley, I helped to stage an exhibit of pelargoniums at the Chelsea Flower Show. That event has shone brightly in my memory ever since. Now, more than 30 years later, I am back exhibiting once more, this time helping to plan and plant a small ‘Chic’ show garden for my old college, New Hall in Cambridge.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the first time that an Oxbridge college has laid out a garden at Chelsea. Called ‘The Transit of Venus’, its theme is suitably cerebral, you will be relieved to hear; it is intended to connect early botanical and astronomical advances, and point up the college’s distinguished record in astronomy (Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars while she was a postgraduate student). The name also refers to the transitory nature of undergraduate life, in what is still a women’s college. The layout echoes the architecture of the college and its exuberantly colourful gardens. Interestingly, many of those closely involved — garden designer, architect, journalists and photographer — studied at New Hall; and all the sponsorship (including that of the iconic Fitzbillies bakery, which is sending us Chelsea buns daily while we put the garden together) has come from local East Anglian companies.
Show gardenmakers are naturally motivated by the knowledge that exhibiting at Chelsea raises their public profile. But and this was apparent to me long before this year — there is much more to it than that. There is such a thing as a Chelsea spirit, which affects all exhibitors. Many of the New Hall team are volunteers, spurred on by an attachment to their old college and the knowledge that it needs endlessly to raise money to fund bursaries and the like, but everyone involved is doing far more than is strictly required of them.
The Royal Horticultural Society now runs, or co-runs, practically all the important large flower shows in England, including Chelsea, Hampton Court, Tatton Park, Malvern Spring and Autumn Shows and BBC Gardeners’ World Live. RHS corporate identity is strong at these shows, as you would expect and, with the exception of Chelsea and perhaps also BBC Gardeners’ World Live, they are not very different from each other, except in timing.
However, there are two long-established large shows, the Harrogate Spring and Autumn Flower Shows, which are the province of a quite distinct organisation, the North of England Horticultural Society. In late April, I travelled up to Yorkshire to breathe in a different atmosphere. Late spring is an excellent time for a show because of the extraordinary flush of growth and flower there is, and because gardeners are still very much in the mood to buy plants — something, incidentally, they cannot do at Chelsea. In four days, nearly 60,000 people walked through the gates but so large is the Great Yorkshire Showground that there was never the crush of humanity that Chelsea visitors know too well.
Because this show is not televised nationally, large-scale sponsorship is hard to come by, so there were very few of the show gardens, which dominate the broadcast coverage at large RHS shows. There is, instead, an emphasis on traditional, high-quality exhibitions of plants from the specialist societies, among them the Northern Fruit Group, the National Sweet Pea Society and the centuries-old Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society.
Most of all, this is a buying fest. The tackiness quotient was quite high in places, plastic foldable trolleys and flimsy wrought-ironwork being particularly big this year. But, to balance that, there was an extensive range of affordable, useful horticultural sundries and a great many wellgrown plants, from nurseries near and far. If this show has a fault, it is that one of the two permanent halls is rather dark but, through the murk, it was possible to discern some wonderful displays of plants, notably those staged by Edrom Nursery of Eyemouth (Best in Show) and Jacques Amand International of Stanmore (Premier Award). Late April is the time, par excellence, for woodland plants, such as erythroniums, trilliums and sanguinarias, and it was a thrill to see them grown so well. The Harrogate Autumn Show, which I have attended in the past, is equally strong on plants, and ideally timed for autumn planting.
The Harrogate crowds were definitely different from those seen at southern shows. The ones I met were extremely friendly, informal and down-to-earth; they seemed careful how they spent their money and were notably proud of their county. In the Flower Arrangement marquee, for example, the theme was, inevitably, Yorkshire Greats, with floristic representations of the lives of Yorkshiremen, from William Wilberforce to David Hockney. There is nothing would-be sophisticated or celeb-focused about Harrogate. I loved it. But, then, I love Chelsea, too — especially this year.
The Harrogate Autumn Flower Show this year runs from 14 to 16 September.
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