Black walls, black plants, war and a droopy Alan Titchmarsh. This year's Chelsea Flower Show had its gloomy side, but there were plenty of reasons to be cheerful too. Jane Powers recounts her garden-admiring, trend-spotting trip.
Alan Titchmarsh was looking a little flushed and droopy on press day at Chelsea Flower Show. And with a busy week stretching ahead, we hoped they'd get him straightened out soon. Of course, I'm not talking about the real live Yorkshireman, who was as determinedly perky as ever while presenting show highlights for the BBC. I'm referring to his namesake flower, being launched at the event. The dusky pink English rose, bred by David Austin, was one of the many new plants being introduced to the public this year.
More than 100 nurseries were gathered in the Great Pavilion, a vast 12,000-square-metre structure: "Enough room to park 500 London buses!" boasted the Royal Horticultural Society promotional bumf. (And with the London Underground service restricted last Saturday, someone would have been grateful for the extra parking space.)
The sights and smells in the prefab building are overwhelming. Swags of roses, mounds of sweet pea, crowds of violas, stands of liquorice-allsort auriculas, and ranks of jelly-coloured lupins waft their scents invisibly through the enclosed space. Mature trees make temporary groves for the week, with birch, maple, eucalyptus, tropical palms and Strelitzia nudging the ceiling. This is a plant-lover's paradise.
It is also a place for those keeping-up-with-the-Joneses people who need to find out what are next year's fashion plants. So listen up: ferns are big. Blechnum brasiliense, an evergreen hard fern, with red juvenile foliage, was shown by Dick Hayward of Rickards Hardy Ferns. Pyrossia, southeast Asian ferns with rusty, furry undersides, were also looking very desirable. (I liked the look of P. polydactylis, with hand-shaped fronds, rather like squashed, dark-green gloves.)
Restios, grass-like plants from South Africa, are still in vogue. "The one that they're all photographing," said Alison Evans of the Big Grass Company, "is Ischyrolepsis subverticillata."
I may not be able to pronounce the name with such aplomb, but I managed to tell her that they've all been growing this plant in Cork since the last century. On the other hand, Thamnochortus spicigerus, which is blue-ish when it first sprouts, was new to me.
True grasses maintain their allure, and two to have, said Neil Lucas of Knoll Gardens, are the variegated quaking grass, Briza media 'Russells', and the Californian Carex praegracilis. The latter is tough, low, dark and evergreen - and not much to look at. But its ability to grow in either sun or dry shade may make it a lawn substitute for difficult places.
Although hostas, with their architectural forms, are loved by show garden designers, they are not as popular among gardeners as they once were. The fact that a slug or snail can irreparably maim a plant in one sitting may be responsible for this.
However, breeders keep popping new ones out - small varieties are big business now. On the Bowden Hostas stand we admired the diminutive, lime-green 'Cracker Crumbs', with its dark green margins - a mere hors d'oeuvre for a hungry mollusc. "Start killing your slugs on Valentine's Day," counselled Ruth Bowden. "Get them before they lay their eggs."
The star plant of the show was an infant Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis), a relative of the monkey puzzle, and known only as a fossil until its discovery in 1994. Fewer than 100 mature trees exist in the Wollemi National Park in Australia, at a secret location about 200km from Sydney. The species' survival has been ensured by a mass-propagation programme, and there will be a limited release of the progeny in October of this year, followed by a more general availability next April (register your interest at www.wollemipine.com). The oldest living Wollemi pine is believed to be around 1,000 years old. If you buy one now, your descendants could be living in it in 3005.
Longevity is not really a concern of the display garden designers at Chelsea - although this year there was much lip service paid to sustainability, recycling and other environmental matters. (I'd like to see what's in the skips rolling out of the Royal Hospital grounds now that the gardens have been dismantled.)
As everyone now knows, there were two Irish entries among the 19 show gardens. Diarmuid Gavin's "Hanover Quay" is to be rehomed in Dublin, and at the time of writing Elma Fenton is still searching for a billet for her "Moat and Castle". Her plot had a swimming canal, its waters naturally purified by plants. An undulating landform ran parallel to it, built from the pool's spoil. And in a self-contained process, the water that ran off her minimal steel-and-timber shelter was fed back into the pool.
The judges gave her a silver medal for her first outing at Chelsea. Diarmuid Gavin bagged an award in the next category up - silver-gilt - for his romantic landscape of box spheres and lavenders punctuated with his familiar pods (or hidey-holes). The creation, his fourth Chelsea garden since 1995, was audaciously simple and, for the most part, quite beautiful.
It wasn't, however, the best garden in the show. But nor was the creation that won that accolade from the judges. The Ecover Chelsea Pensioners' Garden was a shameless pastiche, like a Disney film set. Designed by Julian Dowle (his 26th Chelsea garden), it was supposed to represent a soldier's dream of old Blighty during the second World War, with thatched village pub, "Dig for Victory" veg patch, duck pond, and village green.
It was the first time the Chelsea Pensioners (retired soldiers) had been involved in the garden, and it commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. The seven judges would have been lynched if they had given it anything less than "Best Show Garden". It was supposedly Julian Dowle's last Chelsea garden (although as Diarmuid Gavin remarked: "Julian has had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra.") yet it was his first ever time to win the top award.
More deserving was Christopher Bradley-Hole's "In the Grove", commissioned by long-time Chelsea sponsor Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan before his death last November. Like much of Bradley-Hole's work, it was sophisticated, complex, and austere: a many-planed landscape with multiple vistas and enclosures, created by yew hedging, bamboos, glass screens and stone lattice-work walls.
It was a hot contender for our own Irish Times alternative "Best in Show" award, as was the pretty Fetzer Wine Garden, designed by Kate Frey - where ancient vines poked up through a vibrant meadow of orange California poppies, blue Phacelia and yellow-and-white Layia. But we finally decided on Andy Sturgeon's slightly over-busy Merrill Lynch Garden with its low glass-fronted home office, great blocks of oak, sculptural plantings, and as the other member of our two-strong panel put it: "the holes in the water".
The above perforations were horizontal squares down which a sheet of water noiselessly disappeared. We had no idea how this was achieved, but the dark holes were, for us, a welcome emptiness, a space to rest our eyes on during the hurly-burly that was Chelsea Flower Show.
The 'Irish Times' alternative awards
BEST IN SHOW
Merrill Lynch Garden, designed by Andy Sturgeon.
HAPPIEST GARDEN
The Fetzer Vineyard Garden, designed by Kate Frey.
BEST SMELLING DISPLAY
Ken Muir's strawberry nursery in the Great Pavilion.
MOST GENTLE GARDEN
The Philosopher's Garden by Andrew Loudon, with perfect dry stone sphere and restful planting.
MOST EDIBLE GARDEN
The Roald Dahl Foundation Chocolate Garden with its bubbling chocolate "gloop" pool.
SENTIMENTAL GARDEN
The Ecover Chelsea Pensioners' Garden wins the cringe-making award.
TROPHY GARDEN
Savills, with its ostentatious architecture and I-got-lotsa-dosh plants.
NIMBY GARDEN
The Not In My Back Yard garden was the Sunday Mirror Reflections Garden with its uneasypurple walls, titanium panels and a beautiful Yucca rostrata helplessly marooned in the middle.
Chelsea trends: black is the new green
THE ENVIRONMENT
Peat-free gardening, biodiversity, recycling, sustainability
WAR
Memorials to past and ongoing conflicts
GREEN ROOFS
Sedum, grass or meadow hats on buildings
DARK OR BLACK WALLS
Makes the plants stand out nicely in photographs, but don't try this at home, unless you thrive on melancholia.
GABIONS
Metal mesh cages filled with stones (as seen on a coast or motorway near you).
RECYCLED GLASS
Bonded into paving, stacked into sculptures, or loose and crumbled like gravel.
BLACK AND DUSKY PLANTS
Black flowers launched this year include Hyacinthus 'Midnight Mystique'. Among the new dark-foliaged plants are Heuchera 'Licorice' and Euphorbia 'Blackbird'.
WILDFLOWERS
And wild-looking flowers with an airy habit.
GRASSES
Many of the show gardens included the common Stipa arundinacea - its rust-and-green wispy leaves look well with almost anything.
Although not tree ferns.