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Raking up the past

Ursula Buchan

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

Ursula Buchan on the Royal Horticultural Society's recent flower show in the Inner Temple gardens

The Inner Temple garden has always been a cool, green space on the edge of the Embankment, enjoyed as a lunchtime picnic place by the lawyers who work or live in the surrounding buildings. But this year the garden has been improved and embellished by wonderfully ebullient and generously planted flower borders, designed by Andrea. During the ‘Floral Celebration’, her adventurous and imaginative use of autumn perennials and half-hardy annuals (like the beautiful pink and white Nicotiana mutabilis and the towering, seven-foot tall, purple Persicaria officinalis) rivalled, in exuberance, even Raymond Evison’s terrific display of clematis, or Avon Bulbs’ early autumn bulbs in the show marquee.

Among the nursery displays, there were some attempts to hark back to the Edwardian shows in the Temple, most notably by the RHS’s garden at Wisley, which exhibited both contemporary apples and those which were prominent a century ago, and the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens (NCCPG) which chronicled the history of Veitch’s nursery. Somerset-based Pennard Plants showed a variety of intriguing old garden tools as well as heritage vegetable varieties. On a more contemporary note, Londoners will have appreciated the displays, one inside the marquee and one outside, put on by the Corporation of London, which tends the green spaces in the City. There were no Chelsea-style show gardens (even though the concept of the ‘show garden’ was born at the Temple shows, when a rock garden was erected by the Guildford Hardy Plant Nursery in 1893) but there were a collection of small and not terribly ambitious ‘City balcony’ gardens designed by, among others, Peter Seabrook, Matthew Wilson, and Alex James.