Traditional virtues
Ursula Buchan
You have probably forgotten about this year’s Chelsea Flower Show by now, it having segued into all the other Chelseas you have ever seen. I, however, am still, if not haunted, then certainly preoccupied by it. It wasn’t, strangely, the show gardens, nor yet the plants, so much as the people who have stayed with me this year. The financial world may be crumbling around our ears, children may no longer require fathers, civil liberties may be under threat, but the oldfashioned, traditional virtues of disinterested endeavour, selflessness and hard work were still very evident at Chelsea.
I am thinking, in particular, of the many show exhibitors who toiled and did not count the cost, and laboured but asked for no reward. It is these people who gladden the heart rather more than the bankers at the Gala Evening (another cold evening this year to test the resilience of their glammedup wives) or the celebrities who infest the place on Press Day.
There was, for example, the flower arrangers from the Kent branch of NAFAS (the National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies), redoubtable ladies in pink suits. They organise 43 local clubs in that county, as well as overseeing a number of Junior Flower Clubs for youngsters. No one paid them to come, yet their stand was accomplished and imaginative, and won them a Silver-Gilt medal.
Even more colourful and engaging were the members of the horticultural societies of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados and Mauritius. All these people had travelled a long way, often at their own expense, to show off the tropical plants which grow on their islands. The Mauritians achieved a Gold with a very striking display of anthuriums (genteely known as ‘Flamingo Flowers’), including some new hybrids with small and dainty spathes. These ‘flowers’ threatened to convert me to the charms of a plant I had previously thought one of the most peculiar in all Creation.
Among the selfless and accomplished volunteers, none was more interesting to listen to than Margaret Owen, an octogenarian plantswoman in a purple hat from Shropshire, who staged an impressive stand of camassias and dictamnus, for her county branch of the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens. She has bred pink, plum and amethyst colour forms of Camassia leichtlinii, a genus formerly thought only to produce blue or white flowers.
Finest of all, however, was the Alpine Garden Society exhibit, staged under the direction of Kit Grey-Wilson, showing alpines growing in a variety of garden situations. These plants are grown by AGS members and there were drifts of rare rhodohypoxis as well as the heartachingly lovely, pinkish-white, drooping bells of Lilium mackliniae, a lily discovered by Frank Kingdon-Ward in 1946 in Manipur, northeast India. This stand won both a Gold medal and the President’s Award for best exhibit in the Great Pavilion — which just goes to show that amateur doesn’t necessarily mean amateur at Chelsea.
Even among many of the professionals, however, traditions were respected. Carpet bedding, a horticultural jeu d’esprit developed in the 19th century and rarely practised anywhere now, provided the base of a witty exhibit staged by Cardiff County Council to underline the Welsh capital’s claims to pre-eminence as a sporting venue. There was a gigantic footballer clothed in Echeveria and Alternanthera, but I particularly enjoyed the cricket wicket with silverleaved artemisia forming the crease. It may have been ridiculous but it has done its job: I, for one, will not now forget that Cardiff hosts an Ashes Test Match for the first time next year.
All over the Great Pavilion, commercial nurseries — Bloms (tulips), Three Counties (aquilegias), Walkers (daffodils) — had erected stands bearing a striking resemblance, in staging at least, to those they put up 20 years ago. The names on the labels may have altered, but unless you are a tulip, aquilegia or daffodil enthusiast, you probably wouldn’t notice.
I have clocked up more than 30 Chelsea, but I cannot remember the Blackmore and Langdon stand of delphiniums and begonias changing in any particular, except in the choice of varieties on show. The arrangement — great spires of delphiniums towering over dumpy, tissue-paper begonias, making a rich mixture of blues and oranges — has probably not altered since 1913, the date of the first Chelsea show. Blackmore and Langdon are one of three firms to have managed almost a century of unbroken exhibiting here, the other two being Hilliers and Notcutts. All three companies were awarded Gold medals this year.
All of which will be reassuring to you, if you gave up visiting Chelsea long ago, because of the crowds or the cost of the train fare, and you have grown to loathe the tired and tiresomely arch coverage on television. In some important ways, the show, and the people involved with staging it, are just as they always were. I’m glad.
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