Pursuit of excellence

There was an unexpected outbreak of common sense at Chelsea Flower Show this year. I looked hard for the usual silliness to laugh at, but I was hard-pressed to find much. (There were the celebrities who clutter up the place on Press Day, obviously, but the general public who visit Chelsea are mercifully spared those.) There was much sober purposefulness and little evident desire to épater le bourgeois. Most emperors had obviously decided that the weather warranted them wearing their oldest and warmest clothes. Was it the absence from the show of Diarmuid Gavin and his contrived spats, perhaps, or the fact that the show’s sponsor was Saga Insurance for the first time, or did the chill breeze of current commercial reality wither any desire for wackiness? I cannot say. All I know is that it was so.

The show gardens were, almost without exception, exemplary. We all missed Christopher Bradley-Hole this year, but the other big double-barrelled gun, Tom Stuart-Smith, was on mid-season form for the Daily Telegraph, and carried off the Best Show Garden prize with his clean-lined formal design, defined by high- quality silvered oak decking, ironstone sett paths and rusty-orange corten steel panels and tanks, all of which was subverted by dense drifts and clumps of purple, white and rusty-orange planting, and informal cloud box hedges. Even this magician could not make a silk purse out of Viburnum rhytidophyllum, but otherwise it was a triumph.

Designers are producing gardens that we might actually want to own. We can’t afford them, of course, but at least they bear some relation to our aspirations. The small ‘courtyard’, ‘chic’ and ‘city’ gardens (mainly 4 x 5 metres in size) are particularly interesting from this point of view. They have become a notable feature of Chelsea, introduced to attract young, inexperienced designers of talent with limited budgets (£5,000 to £25,000).