Down with Chelsea

It’s that depressing flower show again, full of forced plants and taking over the television schedules

Have you been to the Chelsea Flower Show this year? Did you find it a little bit depressing? I thought so. For me, it’s like New Year’s Eve — every year I feel I should go and have fun, and every year, almost without fail, it’s a disappointment.

The biggest problem is the crowds. They make the struggle around the show ground a test of stamina and ingenuity. Whenever I hear someone say ‘I just love people-watching’, I suggest they visit the flower show’s loudly trumpeted gardens on Main Avenue. That’ll soon cure them.

The RHS have done their best to relieve the problem, by limiting timed-entry ticket sales, extending the show by a day, and all of that, but the beast just keeps growing. To raise the mountains of beans necessary to feed it, there are champagne breakfasts and Tuesday evening has been revved up into the ‘Gala Preview’. Tickets change hands at up to 750 quid a head. The word gala is bad enough, unless it’s an apple, but in this case, it means a grander version of people-watching. Ringo Starr if you’re lucky. High heels get stuck in the mud and the gardens are largely ignored.

The media’s obsession with Chelsea began weeks ago. Previews in the press of the ‘must see’ attractions gave the game away with their eerie CGI mock-ups of the gardens that would and will never look like that in real life. I love Alan Titchmarsh; he’s an assured presenter and an expert, unlike most of the others who are either one thing or the other, or good-looking — but I do feel for them all, casting about for hyperbole.