Just Stop Oil’s Chelsea Flower Show protest is a new low

You have to sink low, very low, to target the Chelsea Flower show for an environmental protest. But the boys and girls of Just Stop Oil are, it seems, up for tormenting even the most blameless and benign element of society: gardeners.

One of the show gardens, designed by Paul Hervey-Brookes, was sprayed with orange powder. I’m not sure what was its offence. Hervey Brooks can’t have been sponsored by Shell. Maybe there’s a clue in what one of the protesters shouted before being marched off by security: ‘What’s the use of a garden if you can’t eat?’.

Well, I agree that this particular garden wasn’t big on fruit and veg. It seemed purely ornamental to me. But if the Just Stop oil people had included a single gardener, they might have discerned a connection between gardening and eating – that is to say that gardeners don’t merely grow flowers; most of them also turn their hands to fruit and veg. And by definition they’re not flown from the other side of the world like the avocados the protesters probably subsist on.

Home grown veg isn’t economic – the amount I spend on slug pellets that don’t work for the courgettes in my allotment make them easily more expensive than Tesco – but it is environmentally sound. And if you’re not going mad with pesticides – my anti-snail strategy is simply to throw the brutes over the allotment wall – then you’re creating a perfectly good little habitat for bugs, bees and birds.

The tragedy is that Chelsea this year is already woke; as I have mentioned before, some of the show gardens celebrate weeds, on the basis that they’re resilient super-plants. Well, they’re resilient all right. But how eco-protesters can target an institution which is doing everything in its power to get people gardening in the most eco-friendly way is beyond me.

They may, of course, have been targeting the hard surface bit of Hervey-Brookes’ garden, which I would dislike myself. But really, there is a perfectly good target for them to throw orange powder over, and that is a blight that you won’t, I hope, see at Chelsea – namely the artificial lawns that Monty Don has been gunning for. They’re plastic (presumably derived from first cousins of petrochemicals), they allow no animal or plant life to flourish under them, and they look hideous. If the JSO people fancy going through London in a hit squad to squirt orange stuff over artificial lawns, then count me in. But if they’re just making a nuisance of themselves at an event that is not just harmless, but actually benign – celebrating the English love of gardens – well, they’re just bitter and twisted.