The birds of paradise smothering the Cartier store on Sloane Street surrounded by Chinese tourists, and the delphinium and Instagrammers drowning the diamond store opposite, suggest the event unfolding nearby isn’t any old gardening gig.
The Chelsea Flower Show — held for more than a century in the Royal Hospital Chelsea’s grounds — is the most famous horticulture event in the world. And at £122-plus a ticket, surely the most expensive. No wonder when show gardens are said to cost over £600,000 to erect.
It isn’t compulsory to be posh to attend Chelsea but it helps: it swarms with people who look like they survive solely on caviar and wasps — that is to say pinched.
There are layers of clichés — none of them good. Perma-tanned influencers and B-list celebrities (I spotted Anthea Turner and Vogue Williams) more interested in selfies than flowers; old men in linen suits and women shivering in floral dresses (it always rains but it’s considered letting the side down if you don’t pretend it’s 30 degrees) guffawing in cut-glass accents (you might hope for some estuary this close to the Thames).
“Oh it’s Josh! We went to uni together,” a woman in a toile de jouy puffball skirt trills, as we wait for that symbol of meritocracy to appear: namely The King.
Where the show isn’t flora or fawning it’s mostly shopping, and exorbitant. Even a pack of seeds cost £5. I meander between £7,000 Barlow Tyrie outdoor sofas, £129 Rose Oud Holland Cooper candles and £200 straw hats. Who leaves with a bust of Lord Wolfson or a swimming pool on order?
Presumably not one of the four out of five Londoners who don’t have a garden. Extravagant offerings — such as £90 Happy Cabbage cotton dresses and £35 Highgrove jam pots — feel especially absurd for affecting a rustic aesthetic so at odds with their Harrods price tags.
The price of food is equally galling. Lunch at the Ranelagh Restaurant is £123 per person (plus processing fees). Even some salad and chicken at Ottolenghi costs me £27.
It isn’t compulsory to be posh to attend, but it helps
It might seem obvious Chelsea Flower Show is out of touch with the cost of living crisis — like mentioning Prince Harry has a private jet — if it wasn’t so at odds with the RHS’s own misconception of its image. The RHS brochure pledges “every ticket sold helps us nurture people as well as plants” and “simply by being here, you are supporting others”.
Do they mean this year’s Children’s Society Garden, designed “to respond to the growing pressure on teen wellbeing across the UK”?
One doubts most troubled teens will ever hear about it.
Last year Tayshan Hayden-Smith, 29, sensationally quit as RHS ambassador, claiming the show celebrated “spectacle over sustainability, exclusivity over equity”.
“I found it increasingly difficult to witness such spectacle, audacity and deliberate institutional indifference to who bears the cost of that exclusion,” he tells me.
“When I raised questions that any institution serious about its stated values would have welcomed, what followed was silence, then irritation”.
Hayden-Smith, who created the Grenfell Garden of Peace and non-profit Grow to Know to empower young people through gardening, grew up in North Kensington feeling the show was never “meant for the likes of me”. He argued with RHS over making the event accessible to local people in “one of London’s most unequal boroughs — the same borough that failed the residents of Grenfell Tower, and home to some of the most under-served communities in London. That geography does matter.”
“The RHS counts transforming communities through gardening among its own stated objectives… That the institution responded with silence, then resistance, tells you something important about the distance between its stated values and its institutional reality.”
Financial inequality isn’t the only area where Chelsea falls short of its own ambitions.
Most non-white faces at the ground are working. While the absence of female gardeners has long annoyed green-fingered women, including Highgrove garden designer Isabel Bannerman, who tells me: “There are loads of women, gay and LGBT people making plants, budding fruit and roses, growing, breeding and educating who are just not championed enough,” pointing out Gertrude Jekyll and Ellen Wilmott were fundamental in establishing the RHS but it has never had a woman president.
This year women’s equality has been strangely addressed by a garden highlighting female gynaecological issues, designed by a man. Constance Spry would turn in her grave!
It’s hard to balance Chelsea’s eco-ambitions with the sheer volume of lorries, trucks and deliveries spewing fumes around the grounds in a city where air pollution levels are toxic. Meanwhile, who can count the environmental cost of plant refrigerating, hot-housing, watering and plastic potting? The RHS’s slowness to ban fake grass from show gardens, its lack of interest in phasing out concrete or hardcore, and failure to live up to its own promise to make the show peat-free, suggest it is indifferent. And there’s no word what will happen when funding for the Project Giving Back scheme (in which corporate show gardens are installed elsewhere) wraps up this year.
Among Pommery champagne stalls eventually I locate a can of £3.80 water, served with a plastic cup. Compared to the effort made by Glastonbury festival to banish single-use plastic, Chelsea’s lack of attention feels disappointing. Perhaps it doesn’t matter as long as Sloanes continue to sip champagne in designer dresses.
