It is one of the bitterest ironies that the Chelsea Flower Show, opening today to a select few and tomorrow to the many, happens in a city where most people don’t have a proper garden. The number of embittered would-be horticulturalists in London is greater than anywhere else; garden envy — that is, envy of having one, rather than of what’s in it — is a London thing. Chelsea is like a Weddings Show at Olympia for the involuntarily single; a chance to yearn for an alternative existence.
A couple of years ago, the Office for National Statistics produced a breakdown of access to outdoor space across the nation, and the headline finding was that one in eight British households doesn’t have a garden. I can only assume that all of them are in London. Here, the ONS suggested that two thirds of people do have access to outdoor space, in which case my friends must be curiously unrepresentative. In my mansion block there are 12 flats of which one has access to the horrid, pebbled-over garden. That’s a more representative proportion, I reckon.
But on the ONS figures, the amount of outdoor space Londoners have access to is far smaller than elsewhere. So you get pent-up horticultural energies unleashed on very small areas. And you get miracles: people growing trees in pots and broad beans in window-boxes and wisteria in space left by prising up a paving stone. Small wonder that so many new Chelsea showpieces feature small gardens; big herbaceous borders are for country people.
But what we do have in London are allotments, though they’re terrifically over-subscribed and prescriptive. I’m very grateful for mine, the size of a big kitchen table, but the rules don’t allow you to grow potatoes or fruit bushes, and only a fifth of the space can be for flowers. (I’m getting round that by growing sweet pea vertically up poles.)
It’s a price we pay for living in London, but it means there isn’t an outlet for frustrations … there’s nothing like weeding for a temper. But passions run high. My neighbour pulled up my lemon verbena last year because it impinged on her patch; I was far from pleased.
Still the Chelsea show is a chance for the country gardeners to come to covet the show delphiniums and for all of us to recall that the Fall of Man happened after Adam and Eve left a garden.
