Building a Chelsea Flower Show garden - the story continues

Chronicling Chelsea

May 14, 2022

closeup photo of excavator bucket on road — Photo by Kuan Fang on Unsplash

That’s a lot. And you do have to get a lot done. At the start, you have a tightly-programmed schedule in which you have noted every single eventuality that you can think of. You’ve examined the timetable and you know exactly what is going to happen when, and you give yourself a bit of leeway which will mop up any unforeseens. Trees will arrive one day, the engineer will arrive another day, plants another day, and you have carefully ensured that everything will be out of the way of everything else. You won’t have too many people on the garden at any one time, and all the specialists (eg water engineers, electricians, sculptors) will have the perfect conditions in which they will be able to carry out their work perfectly.

Tree arriving on time. It can take an hour to manoeuvre these down Main Avenue, and 1 day and 6 people to get them into position on site. It’s painstakingly slow - you don’t want three tonnes of tree swinging around.

Let me tell you right now that there’s always something. Even if your own plans are running seamlessly, it only takes another garden’s articulated lorry to park in front of your plot,(nobody’s fault, it simply has nowhere else to go), and your whole day can be thrown out. And then you have to start catching up, which involves rejigging things. Which means you have to think on your feet, and the specialists have to work around other specialists. You continue to keep calm and you continue to carry on.

There’s a lot of waiting. And while you’re waiting, you’ve got to keep out of everyone else’s way.

For example, when you see that there’s a gap at the back of your garden that you’d kind of predicted and catered for, (see previous post) and then not only is a tree smaller than you’d thought, but the screen behind your plot goes up a foot taller than you’d expected, and therefore you’ve got a big gaping black hole, you have to move quickly. You resort to sketchy scribbles on photos - below left - and fabulous nurseries on the other end of the phone running around to see what they can find to deal with the impending disaster - below right. There’s a lot of on-feet-thinking.

Notes on the left. On the right, a very helpful Helen at Majestic Tree Nursery.

And all the time you’re still digging, and it’s noisy.

The beep-beep-beeping of a reversing lorry is a sound that invades your dreams: even now, if I hear one on the street, in an instant it transports me back to the clamour and dust of this building site. The scrape of a digger bucket on concrete, the hiss of exhausts, and the headthrumming thump of the generator, with whom you have a love-hate relationship. After all, no generator, no tea.

There was a lot of beep-beep-beeping and digging on this Rock Bank site which sits at the end of Main Avenue. As its name suggests, it’s a slope which most designers build on by going up the slope, going with what’s already there. In order to create more of a cosy and intimate setting, which people could look down into rather than up at, I had decided instead to sink the garden down.

So it was that we were digging up ground that hadn’t been interfered with for decades, and my goodness, what we found:

Digging out the slope, we found treasure.

Old bottles, lots and lots of them, all undisturbed for years. Just a few remained intact after the digger had ploughed into them. (The irony that we found these in a spot where I’d originally, back at design stage, intended to place Wedgwood artefacts below ground under a glass cover wasn’t lost on me).

On we went.

As with every build, the aim is to make everything as easy as possible, and I’d known right at the beginning of starting this design that arches of actual stone and backdrops of actual steel were going to be expensive, heavy and tricky. Fine to install over a couple of months, but when you have half a day to do what you’d normally do in two months, you need to come at it from another angle.

I’d therefore been super-excited a year earlier when I discovered a material which can with a paintbrush flick, imitate other finishes. The idea of plaster and steel could all be conjured up with special solutions, which could all be applied before the show. Time and money would be saved, and it would be a flatpack installation, a garden in an instant.

Plastered arches duly arrived and were dropped into place, the backdrops and walls were clad with Corten steel-effect plywood. And I made sure that I made it absolutely clear in the brief what these materials were.

You will possibly have heard of The Brief.

This is the document that you supply the judges with in order that they can get an understanding of what your garden is going to be. It’s as if there’s an imaginary client who has given you this brief, this description of what they want in the garden, and then the judges suddenly become this client, checking to see that you’ve delivered what you promised. And just like in the ‘real world’, you need to stick to what you’ve promised.

One of the things you have to be careful about in your brief is the necessity of clarity. For example, there would have been no point in my stating that these structures in this garden would be made of stone - the fact that they weren’t would be spotted straight away as soon as the judges stepped on site, tapping and prodding as they are prone to do (I know this because I am a RHS shows judge and I tap and I prod). Marks would be lost.

So in filling in my questionnaire, I made it clear that these arches were board and plaster, that they were intended to be plaster, that the uprights were coated steel, and the retaining walls were coated ply. That, I thought, was enough to have it all under control. I’ll be coming to what actually happened in this judging in an upcoming post.

So back to the construction. The structures were in. The relief.

At some point over these few days, a decision had been taken to give the arched structure one last coat of plaster effect in order to rectify a little bit of damage sustained during transport. You can imagine my reaction as I was informed that this would involve two things: another coating of the specific liquid effect, and dry weather.

Guess what?

A seen unforeseen, it rained.

Of course it rained.

Arches and backdrop in. I could still see that black gap but I knew it was being sorted. I couldn’t sort the rain though.

We all kept smiling. Nothing was anyone’s fault, more a case of good old Murphy’s Law. But, looking on the one bright side, sheltering in what was going to become Wedgwood’s gorgeous tea conservatory gave me another view into the garden. Time to think about it, to reflect, and after the rain I returned to this spot again and again, when the sun had come out and the covers had come off. It became one of my favourite views into the garden.

For a year this garden had been in my mind: I knew what it was meant to look and feel like, and here it was, starting to become a ‘thing’. Starting to become reality. It’s a funny old moment when you see that imagined thing becoming reality. It’s a good feeling, as drawings and plans can show what something is going to look like, but what they can’t convey is the atmosphere which up until this moment I’ve tried to conjure up for everyone with words.

And just a few day later, the sun did decide to come out.

We were now at the stage in the programme when all the main, dusty building work was supposed to have been completed. We’d have clear access to plant the rear beds - right at the very back of the garden and in the corners - before the water feature was lined and therefore rendered inaccessible. One of the things you really don’t want to do is walk on fragile pond liner with big heavy steel toe capped workboots. All the machinery and tools would be off the garden, and so we wouldn’t be getting in anyone’s way. We would be able to heave heavy pots over to this corner, two people lugging these lumpen weights between them and shifting them into their spaces. After that feat, we’d be moving swiftly on to the hundreds of small pots that could be passed over quickly and planted by someone who could only get into this spot at this precise point in the construction, as after that, they wouldn’t be able to go across the water. And then lining would go down.

But (there are quite a few ‘buts’ here, I know) the rain had put paid to all that, and this is where we were:

Tools. Sand. Gravel-laying. Wood-sawing. There was no way that we could carry plants through all what you see in the photograph above, and even if we were to do so, they’d only get covered in dust and dirt.

Bang on schedule, the plants had already arrived, on dozens of Dutch trolleys, one of the most unwieldy wheeled items I have ever come across. Think shopping trolley with brakes on. Fine on nurseries and smooth ground, they don’t like bumps, kerbs and crowded places, and each one needs two people to manoeuvre it. And don’t even think about trying to make one turn a corner or go up a step. You’d have more luck with a Dalek on this ground.

Looking inside a Dutch trolley. (Yes I know there aren’t many flowers)

The idea was that our trolleys were to arrive, we’d decant the plants to where we needed them, and then we’d be able to dispense of the trolleys , as we’d always known that there wouldn’t be any room to store them in our tight location.

This would ensure that each nursery would get its own trolleys back. Each trolley is tagged so that you know who its owner is; nevertheless, you definitely don’t want to get these expensive contraptions muddled, or worse, ‘mislaid’. Major disgruntlement will occur if you do.

Looking at the outside of a Dutch trolley. And flowers. This is what you do want to see.

Due to weather delays, this plan for planting, foolproof and failsafe, was not to be.