Too many Chelseas?

For more than ten years I have been visiting the annual jamboree that is Chelsea Flower Show.  Some years I have just gone for the evening. In other years I have endured the long slog conferred by a full day ticket. In 2004 I had the pleasure of helping Nicola Lesbirel build her gold medal winning Laurent Perrier garden. The best way to see Chelsea might be before the gardens are complete. Many show gardens have some last minute addition that manages to destroy the harmony of what, up until that point, looked great.

During this last ten years I have taken the plunge of leaving a career in marketing of many years standing to start my own fledgling garden design business. My early trips to Chelsea were with uncritical, admiring eyes. As I progressed through the course I began to appreciate that a Chelsea Show Garden is not an actual garden but a tableau, something to be viewed for a few days in May rather than lived in throughout the year. The emphasis is on Show rather than Garden.

So now I go to Chelsea expecting a show, something spectacular or provoking or just plain fun. Some years my expectations are met, or even exceeded, some years I am disappointed.  Standout gardens for me over the years have included Shao Fan’s 2008 garden. Unusually, it was set well into the ground and appeared as though it had been excavated from the bare earth.

Shao Fan's 2008 garden

In the same year Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s Daily Telegraph Garden was a vision of cool, calm beauty with a rhythmic stone path that swung along the surface of a pool. In retrospect, 2008 was a vintage year as I was also impressed by Haruko Seki and Makato Saito’s shimmering garden of pure lines and restrained, textural planting in that year. The lack of actual flowers in the garden was said to be the reason they were denied a gold medal.

On the whole, 2012 was a disappointing year. The Main Avenue gardens, the most pretigious spots, were mostly a collection of recti-linear geometry based designs that we have seen so often that they are now almost a Chelsea cliché. Sarah Price’s Telegraph garden was an honourable exception, with delicately pretty planting softening a stylised, jagged limestone pavement and copper edged pool. The most original Main Ave garden, was Jihae Hwang’s Korean DMZ Forbidden Garden. On a notoriously tricky, triangular plot, Jihae Hwang concocted a garden that had the most powerful sense of place. It was mysterious. You could only see tantalising glimpses inside the garden, but that was okay because, unusually, members of the general public were allowed onto the garden to explore. The tumbling planting made it feel romantic but the helmet, shells and wire were poignant reminders of what the garden represented, the Korean Demilitarized Zone. The watch-tower created a strong structural presence in the garden, so often achieved through countless, modernist garden pavillions aimlessly loitering at the end of many Main Ave show gardens over the years. In this garden, the structure effortlessly communicated the concept while performing an important design function. The garden worked well as a spatial design, it had interesting planting and an important message. Why can’t all show gardens be like this?

Jihae Hwang's Korean DMZ garden