It’s Chelsea week – officially the start of the Season – so brace yourself for acres of breathy coverage and All The Tropes from SW3. The Royal Walkabout! Red-coated Chelsea Pensioners being patronised! Glossy influencers who wouldn’t know a peony from a Philip Treacy pillbox hat knocking back champagne! Expect many, many shots of people’s backs as they struggle to see anything for the price of their £122 (or more) ticket.
Oh, and the gardens themselves. Something of a sideshow to the main event of being seen to be there, the format rarely deviates. There’s the ‘Eco’/ ‘rewilded’/ ‘woo woo’/ ‘hortiwoke’ garden; essentially a curated collection of weeds you could see on any railway embankment. The celebrity garden (this year David Beckham is doing the honours, with a bit of help from the King — as you’ll know already because it’s been drip-fed by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) press juggernaut for months). You’ll also have read about Chelsea lifting its gnome ban this year, because the King, being posh, is partial to one (he has one in the Stumpery at Highgrove).
Then there are the usual giant monolithic hulks along Main Avenue designed by men (as one female designer laughs hollowly, more men called Tom have won Best in Show than women over the past 20 years). This is curious, given that the gardening industry and so many of its totemic figures, past and present — from Vita Sackville-West to Mary Keen to Isabel Bannerman and Jo Thompson — have X chromosomes, but then, the RHS is not exactly forward-thinking and often obtusely tone-deaf.
