Chelsea challenge

As you make your sandwiches and get out your comfortable shoes ready for a day at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show next week (24–29 May), do spare a thought for the 600 exhibitors of show gardens, plants, floral arrangements, educational exhibits and sundries.

As you make your sandwiches and get out your comfortable shoes ready for a day at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show next week (24–29 May), do spare a thought for the 600 exhibitors of show gardens, plants, floral arrangements, educational exhibits and sundries. Theirs is not an especially happy lot.

This year’s cold and dry late-April and May with frosts at night have forced designers of show gardens to scrabble for substitute plants, while nurserymen, with exhibits in the Great Pavilion, have a more than usually worrying time getting the plants to the right stage for showing. Those who ‘force’ or hold back out-of-season plants always expect difficulties, but even the growers of Oriental poppies, bearded irises, peonies, lupins and other natural late-May flowers, will be experiencing problems.

These are challenges for this year’s show, but things have generally got harder for exhibitors in recent years. They feel they must have a presence at Chelsea since it is the most famous and prestigious flower show in the world, yet it is ever more expensive to book a pitch there, put up staff in central London and negotiate traffic and congestion charge costs. Plant exhibitors cannot sell their goods off the stand as they can at other shows, yet visitors don’t give them many orders any more. One nursery exhibitor told me, in a tone of justifiable exasperation, that people simply take digital photographs of the stand’s flowers and name labels and then order the plants from the cheapest nursery website on the internet.