UK:CLEARLY TERROR of the UK's 80,000 registered flower arrangers gripped the designers of this year's Chelsea Flower Show, in London, as they pored over their planting schemes.
While the display by the country's National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies looked like an explosion in a paint factory, the brightest colour in most of the show gardens was the pink champagne in the sponsors' glasses.
Grey, pale green and white dominated, with the odd raucous patch of purple alliums.
The allium, a giant ornamental onion, is the perfect Chelsea flower, one grower confided: "It's the only thing in the show that doesn't have to be pulled or pushed, it flowers bang on time for Chelsea every year - and it lasts all week."
"It can be slightly disconcerting to arrive at Chelsea and see that everyone else seems to have got exactly the same idea," said Tom Stuart-Smith, the designer of the Laurent-Perrier garden, a dappled haven of ferns, white foxgloves, peonies and geraniums. "You do start to wonder if there's something in the air."
Whatever was in the air, it had even infected the normally rambunctious Irish garden designer Diarmuid Gavin, who teamed up with design and restaurant tycoon Sir Terence Conran to produce another example of the dappled oasis: ferns, grasses, clipped box, bamboos, and a mini-forest of lollipop-shaped laurels casting an inky shade.
The division of labour was instantly clear: Gavin bounded about the place like Tigger - "No water, look. I'm much more child-friendly now, I've even been forced to fill in my water feature at home" - while his team-mate sat tranquilly in the pavilion he designed, drinking coffee and reading the Financial Times.
Conran looked up briefly when asked about the one element which rather shattered the calm - the giant metal daisies springing up from all that good-taste greenery. "Very Gavinish. Very, very, very Gavinish," he said. - (Guardian service)