Sod’s Law visits Chelsea. Monday, Press Day, the royal inspection and the only time you can wander in relative ease round a show without a crowd, was a perfect summer’s day: light sun, a faint breeze under a cloudless sky. Tuesday; cool, sky grey and drizzle turning to rain.
There are fewer Show Gardens than in the past, but one or two were memorable. Trad’s Garden of the Show rarely chimes with the official judgement; it’s the same with wine ratings, but then I’m a heedless hedonist. My favourite was the Roman villa, complete with attendants (not, I think, ‘enslaved persons’) in togas. I don’t know whether the water dripping quietly from the eaves into a marble channel in the floor was really a Roman trick to cool the loggia, but I hope so. (By Tuesday of course it was unneeded; the heavens did the job).
The actual gardens, to my taste, were predictably more about ‘sustainability’ than beauty – or even use. I suspect Tom Stuart-Smith will be rated one day as the Repton of our time: his touch is so sure, authoritative, stylish but somehow realistic and comfortable. His palette this year was calmly green and white, with some purple for contrast. His biggest plants were, of all quiet things, three ordinary hazel bushes of significant size. A substantial wooden hut, a stone water tank and a cluster of clay pots set the tone of almost humdrum existence heightened by intelligent, rather than eye-catching, planting.
