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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Raking up the past

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

The best enterprises look to the future but honour their past, which is why it was encouraging that the Royal Horticultural Society should last week have returned to the Inner Temple gardens to hold a show, almost a century after the last time it did so. The Great Spring Show was staged there from 1888 to 1911, until it outgrew the site and moved to the Chelsea Hospital grounds where it has remained ever since. This year’s show, a ‘Floral Celebration’, was appropriately enough, supported by the City firm of solicitors, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and it attracted 16,000 people over three days.

Its staging should have cheered all those who think the Society has become a little careless of its two-day London Flower Shows in recent times. These have been held for over a century in the two halls the Society owns in Westminster, but their number has recently been cut from eight to four a year — as a result, the Society says, of falling visitor numbers and logistical difficulties for exhibitors. When I worked for the RHS at Wisley in 1975, these shows were known as ‘Fortnightlies’ and, although they were no longer quite as frequent as that, there were still at least 16 a year. So the Floral Celebration had the potential to reconnect gardeners with the possibilities that flower shows offer in the capital.

This year, the Inner and Middle Temple Inns celebrate 400 years since the granting of their royal charters. There is a record of a garden in the Temple exactly 700 years ago, in 1308 and, according to Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses kicked off, as they say, in the Temple gardens, with the plucking of white and red roses. So 2008 was plainly a good moment to stage something out of the ordinary in London, especially as the Inner Temple garden is presently benefiting from a fruitful collaboration between two energetic and knowledgeable gardeners, the master of the garden, Judge Simon Brown Q.C. and the recently appointed head gardener, Andrea Brunsendorf.

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