An insider's view into designing and building a garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show
Chronicling Chelsea
Here’s an idea
Why not come up with a design for a garden, for something you’ve never tried out before and therefore you don’t know if it is even completely possible, using plants that may not even flower? Then commit to building it in 19 days, and at the end of all of this, showing it to the public? Oh, and not forgetting to put yourself and your design skills at the mercy of judges who will decide, in their wisdom, whether your garden merits a medal of any colour? Does any of the above sound like a good idea to you?
I was reminded of this no-brainer of a question as I walked round the Malvern Spring Festival early one morning last week, as designers with queasy expressions fled from us, the judges, as we approached each garden.
Possibly one of the worst parts of making one of these show gardens is the realisation that you’ve now handed over for public scrutiny that precise thing which has a.consumed your thoughts for a whole year and b.consumed your energies totally for the last month. Surviving on adrenaline with only a few hours’ sleep each night, your mission is to bring to life that one great idea that you truly hope is still original, exciting and capable of transporting the garden visitor - whether they’re seeing it in real life, or via the television or though a photo - into your mind, into your vision.
I’ll be telling you more about the judging process later on in this series; for now, let me take you back in time to the showground of The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, where I was building a show garden for Wedgwood.
Me on 8th May 2019:
This blurriest of photos, taken on a cold and rainy two-coat day, sums up the reality. For these three weeks in May, if you’re going to be on the flower show site every day, for the construction of your show garden on what starts off as a bare patch of land in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, you need to pack clothes for four seasons. This year it’s looking like the people who are there building gardens are luckily having brilliant weather conditions: what you want is a good steady daily 18-20 degree temperature, with convenient light rainfalls from 8pm through to about 4am. That’s the ideal world.
What you don’t want is rain, and cold. Rucksacks in the past have been stuffed with thermals, shorts, waterproofs, suncream and London-plane-pollen-combatting antihistamines, because you never quite know what you’re going to get. Not only does a torrential downpour halt all building, and thus throw out your carefully-programmed schedule, but it also makes you very, very wet and very, very cold, as there isn’t usually anywhere to get changed/store your belongings. Why not? Well, it’s because you want to dedicate most of your garden budget to the making of the very best garden that you can, and a shed’s-worth of £250 can buy a lot of plants. Let me share with you that there can be MAJOR shed-envy when some designers show up with luxuries such a roof. (I remember that somebody once even had a skylight. And don’t even get me started on coathooks.)
Often, even if there is the money for one, you still don’t get to have a shed; if there’s physically no space for it to go, you simply have to suck up your discomfort, keep calm and carry on. Here (see photo below) on the spot called the Rock Bank, the designer mustn’t ever get attached to their shed if they’re lucky enough to have one: it usually arrives a few days after work has commenced, and you get to enjoy it for probably another week or so before it has to make way for the neighbouring BBC tower, which, if you’ve ever watched the coverage, you’ll be familiar as the spot where Monty Don and Joe Swift sit and proffer thoughts on all as the actual week of the show progresses.
You can just see its frame here in the background on the left, around three days into the building of this Wedgwood garden:
And so the shed has to get moved: the forks of a forklift lift it up, and if you’re lucky, your rickety little wooden structure, your one protection against both thunder and blazing sun and the one place where you can leave all your earthly possessions, survives its juddering relocation and sits happily in the road next to you for a couple of days. That is, before the arrival of the articulated lorry bearing 20 Dutch trolleys1 of your plant delivery, and your neighbour’s plant delivery, and your neighbour’s neighbour’s plant delivery. Then you wave goodbye to your shed. Or you figure something out with a bit of bartering and haggling. More on shed envy will be coming in another post, along with the Portaloo Wars of RHS Chatsworth. I’m not joking.
So, this is probably the stage at which all those who are currently building gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are round about now, shunting sheds and piling on/peeling off layers of clothing as the weather demands. I’ll be intrigued to hear if there’s been any shed envy this year.
Let’s now go back to the beginning of the seed of the concept for this Wedgwood garden.
This was the idea that I’d had the year before, in 2018:
I wanted to create a serene space. Something simple, something different. Elegant and easy for the viewer to understand, with ideas to take home. The design went like this: clear architectural arches intersected by a rill, to be brought to life with colour. Colour coming from the hard materials of rusting Corten steel and cream stone using an experimental2 material, all softened with an experimental never-seen-before-at-Chelsea planting palette of peaches, pinks and corals, with roses and peonies creating dreamy sorbets.
At this initial stage of coming up with the concept, the colours are all in my mind: the feel of the garden, the atmosphere, the effect - all of these are generated eventually by the colour palette, and it’s my intention each time I create a show garden to bring something new to the show. All the way through, though, I do absolutely need to be careful that what I create is not going to be just a show-pleaser (hopefully pleasing anyway), but is also going to be relevant to real gardens: an arrangement of just this pink and peachy palette would be a bit too much in a real garden, and in later posts in this series I’m going to be sharing this garden’s plant list with you, and I’ll be going through how I varied it in the garden at the show and also how I would adapt this scheme for a real garden.
The planting proved to my amazement so popular3 that every single email I received after the show asked for a copy of the plant list, so I ended up putting it on my website and is available here. (These peaches and corals and dusky pinks also made it to the front cover of the Gardener’s Palette, which you can buy here).
Let’s rewind again.
Back to the underpinnings of this proposed garden. It needed to be simple, clear, new colours, easy…. EASY. Screeching to a stop at the word easy, for I know that the garden has to be comprehensible, I need to test the idea out. It needs to be easy for the show visitor in terms of what the garden is meant to be, but also to those pesky judges who are going to question it to within an inch of its life. I need to make sure that the layout will work, that those arches will stand up, that the rill makes sense, that the trees will fit, that the levels will be correct.
And how am I going to test all that?
Why, with a model, of course:
A model is an absolute essential for a show garden. Whilst for ‘real’ gardens, I find detailed models, both real and virtual, can often mislead and over-promise, for one snapshot in time a built model for a show garden serves me well. It means that I can figure out loads of stuff. Where the trees are going to go. What ‘borrowed’ backdrop is available. What is too much. What needs more thought. Those of you who can remember this garden as it actually turned out might have spotted that there were some changes between model-building and show-building: the pool on the left of the design originally held a sculpture, which the model showed up as way too busy, so out went this idea. In my mind, the terrace on the right had been intended to reveal a super-snazzy self-opaquing glass floor which at the flick of a button would reveal Wedgwood artefacts. Seeing this model drummed home the absolute ridiculousness of this notion. Into the bin it went.
(I’ve been reminded, writing about this, about another garden model which was incredibly helpful in an amusing way: there’s going to be a picture of that in a separate thread which will follow this post).
So in theory, this model sorts everything out for you before you start to make the actual garden…..in theory.
Well. You know that borrowed backdrop I mentioned just a moment ago? That landscape which designers all love and fall upon as soon as we spot it? On the Chelsea building site there are plenty of these borrowed landscape opportunities (unless you’re right up against the pavilion, in which case the one thing you are not wanting to borrow is its massive white backdrop), and in theory you can see their potential locations quite easily when you make your visits to the site a year before.
I had done all that. I knew the site. We had a fabulous borrowed landscape opportunity in the form of the majestic London plane trees that grow on the Embankment beyond the boundaries of the show.
We’d made a model. We’d drawn in the trees, and we’d figured out that along the back boundary of the garden, the arching structures wouldn’t allow room for the 1m diameter of that one last tree I needed, which then meant that there’d be a small gap that would need camouflaging. So we’d decided that we would need to engineer a ledge which would hold a few large green shrubs, tall enough to green the black backdrop erected to screen the extraordinary BBC ‘village’ that moves in every year, but small enough to make the most of those London planes.
At this point, as a designer, you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself that you’ve covered eventualities. Not all eventualities, mind you, as you know full well that that you always have to expect the unexpected at Chelsea. But, if you’ve managed to fling yourself in front of any of these unforeseens on their way to hijacking your garden, you’re feeling ok. You’re feeling good, in fact. Not smug, but just quietly in control.
Back on site.
The ledge has been engineered. All the trees have been hefted and nudged in, with the exception of that one last acer, which is planned to sit to the left of the fabulous cedar, leaving that estimated metre of black expanse which will need to be hidden, as you’ve already so cleverly predicted.
And so….. in she goes - the final tree is manoeuvred into place. Ta dah, voilà, clapping of hands: another thing can be ticked off the schedule.
But
Can you spot the issue in the photo below?
The tree that I’d selected a year before hadn’t QUITE grown how we expected it to. We were thinking it would look more like this:
But it didn’t. 70cm narrower than it should have been, this tree was an Unforeseen.
Whichever way I looked at it, wherever I stood, there was a problem. A borrowed backdrop with a big black border was not going to cut it for anyone: me, visitors, photographers. And definitely not for judges.
There was only one thing to be done.
For what the solution was, stay tuned…. more Access All Areas posts and threads are coming this week.
I’m really hoping that you’ve enjoyed this first real delve into a behind-the-scenes look at how these shows happen, why a designer does it, and what they and their team go through, all with the aim of producing a garden for people to enjoy.
Wheeled plant trolleys - I cannot wait to tell you about Dutch trolley sagas…. how they work, how they don’t, what happens when they get muddled up…. a story for another time
The word experimental should carry with it a big red flag… again, for another time
(I know this sounds a bit boasty but it’s not meant to - I was genuinely amazed as I’d been genuinely terrified that people wouldn’t like it as it was designed to test the idea that pink and yellow clash. Which begs the question ‘Why do it in the first place?’ which takes back to the very first paragraph)
A very enjoyable read. I used to work in TV News and like most TV/Film you know the reality of how everyone is working is not reflected in the lovely live position the viewers at home see!
Wow, I feel like i've been on an emotional rollercoaster! Phew! The ups and downs of show gardens, and then, when the gardens are open to the public, it looks as though it has just perfectly been placed there, so serenely, no dramas at all.... I have just completed my first (very, very small) show garden here is Aust, and I can say, no matter what scale, there is always highs and lows, and highs... and lows... But fun times! Absolutely love hearing your stories Jo!