The best of Chelsea

Purple irises and scarlet-red poppies were the silent stars of this year's flower show, writes FIONNUALA FALLON

LIKE TEMPORARY MOVIE sets in a Hollywood backlot, the many wonderful gardens, stands and displays that filled last week’s Chelsea Flower Show’s 11-acre show grounds are now gone, their constituent parts being dismantled, packed-up and ferried off site as I write. As the dust slowly begins to settle, here’s a look at some of the silent stars of this year’s show: the plants.

Foliage, rather than flowers, was central to the planting of Diarmuid Gavin’s towering, botanical skyscraper. Leafy and lush, its black and gold scaffolding was clothed in giant bamboos and climbers like the evergreen Trachelospermum jasminoides, while its shady storeys were filled with birch trees, pines, box balls, ferns, heucheras, rodgersias and hostas, as well as vegetables and herbs, all growing in pots or roughly-hewn wooden crates.

Elsewhere, frothy, delicate umbellifers were a feature of many of the shows’ award-winning gardens, underscoring the continuing trend for naturalistic, meadow-style planting. Cleve West’s nostalgically beautiful “Best in Show” garden used the pink-stemmed, lime-green flowers of Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green Dream’, Meum athamanticum and Seseli libanotis as well as the annual Daucus carota and the lovely lace-flowered, Orlaya grandiflora to create tall layers of delicate planting. Scarlet-red ladybird poppies in the foreground were almost the only vividly colourful note; otherwise this was a garden that used a gentle colour palette of plants delineated by beech hedging and punctuated by sculptural topiary and pollarded lime trees.

Sarah Price, one of the bright young stars of British garden design, also used plenty of umbellifers in her gold-medal winning garden, which she intermingled with wild flowers (meadowsweet, cuckoo flower, lady’s slipper orchid, water avens, campion) as well as rushes, docks, ferns and native grasses. The result was ethereally lovely – a 21st-century homage to the damp meadowlands, shady woodlands, waterways and “wild places” hidden deep within the British countryside.

Irises also starred in many of the best gardens, Adam Frost’s gold-medal garden featured purple irises studded through drifts of grasses while, along with the giant umbellifer, Peucedanum verticillare, one of the key plants of Andy Sturgeon’s Arts Crafts inspired, gold-medal-winning garden was the inky Iris chrysographes ‘Black Form’. Designer Joe Swift also used swathes of russet-coloured irises (varieties ‘Red Zinger’ and ‘Langport Wren’) intermixed with the reddish-brown mullein Verbascum ‘Petra’ to complement the copper-toned, architectural arches of his drought-tolerant garden.

I loved Arne Maynard’s pleached copper beech hedge, the ancient pear tree, the box balls on their crooked stems and the pebble path constructed by Turkish craftsmen as well as the silvery, spiny silhouettes of the Scottish thistle Onopordum acanthium that he used throughout his showgarden. Roses were another major element; the designer used 300 of them including the fragrant, lilac-pink, ‘R. Reine Victoria’ trained over low domes of hazel.

But my favourite of all the large show gardens was that of designer Jihae Hwang, an evocation of the strip of land known as the Korean Demiltarised Zone (KMZ), which is now a natural sanctuary for indigenous plants and wildlife. Wonderfully subtle and deeply atmospheric, the tangle of plants used in this highly original garden were predominantly Korean natives – actinidias, sanguisorbas, thalictrums, and arisaemas, with spots of bright colour coming from flowers such as Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’.

Trees at Chelsea ...

Andy Sturgeon used the Katsura tree (Cercidiphyllim japonicum), Cleve West used topiarised yews, Diarmuid Gavin used dwarf pines and Betula nigra, Sarah Price’s garden featured multi-stemmed silver birch while Joe Swift used Prunus ‘Amber Beauty’.

Hard landscaping

Many of the large show garden featured creamy limestone paving/walls, copper-edged water-features, rills and large rectangular pools. West’s garden used reclaimed granite setts, antique, copper-coloured metal gates and a 300-year-old well-head, while Joe Swift’s garden featured arches of tawny cedar wood.

Nurseries

Many brilliant nurseries exhibited in Chelsea's Grand Pavilion this year. Avon Bulbs' lovely display ( avonbulbs.co.uk) included Allium schubertii, whose giant pink flowers twinkle like fireworks at a New Year's Eve party. Jacques Amand's ( jacquesamand.com) stand featured an astonishing range of arisaemas, while the stand of gold-medal winning Hardy Cottage Garden Plants ( hardys-plants.co.uk) showed off lots of covetable Chelsea must-haves.

French nursery Cayeux ( iris-cayeux.com) displayed a brilliant selection of irises, Norfield Nurseries had a tantalising range of Japanese maples/acers, while the stand of rare plants nursery Edulis ( edulis.co.uk) included lots of dainty umbellifers and the fantastically mottled leaves and furry red stems of Podophyllum 'Spotty Dotty'. But star of the show was surely the RHS Plant of the Year 2012, Digitalis 'Illumination Pink'.

Trend to watch

Urban Greening: Capel Manor's stand featured pictorial meadows grown from a range of seed mixes including one suitable for living roofs. Writtle College's quirky display used discarded bottle tops and old mustard jars to create mini food gardens, while 'The Space Race' showed how to get maximum use from the smallest garden. The Chelsea Fringe Festival ( chelseafringe.com, continues until June 10th) highlighted the huge range of community-based garden projects taking place through the city.

Dates for your diary

The Rathmines Initiative Garden Trail takes place on Saturday and Sunday, June 9th-10th in aid of The Rathmines Community Playgroup. Contact Michael Kelly at 087-6697722 for further details.

The closing date for applications for this year's RDS Allotment Awards is Friday, June 8th. For an application form/criteria for entry, see rds.ie/cat_project_detail.