Chelsea: a personal view

Sarah Price’s spectacular Benton irises at the Chelsea Flower Show

I’ve just worked out that this has been my 26th Chelsea Flower Show. It still excites me every time, and this year I think there has been a particular buzz to the show, not least because of all the insect life in the wild gardens that have already had Daily Mail readers outraged. Dandelions at Chelsea? Really? Well, yes, along with the odd nettle, plenty of teasels and the rampant herb robert that I am always pulling out of my garden in handfuls. Cleve West’s haunting stage set depicts a ruined house and its garden reclaimed by nature. Every detail has been meticulously executed, from piles of rubble colonised by plants to the Victorian tiled path bisected by a fallen tree. But is this a garden? I suspect for many people this will have been hard to understand - what design ideas can they take away from this? From a personal point of view though I enjoyed this exhibit. It is a conceptual space which also represents the uprootedness of being homeless for its charity Centrepoint, and it makes you think. It makes you see the beauty in so-called weeds and it makes you understand the way that low-impact, non-interventional gardening is good for nature. We need to work out new, sustainable ways of gardening as the climate changes, and Chelsea can start these conversations. I came back home and decided I would be less brutal with the herb robert for a while, to let some of it creep in round the edges and see what happens.