Chelsea Flower Show's theme of drought awareness was cruelly mocked by Mother Nature, writes Jane Powers beneath her umbrella.
The god of weather, or whoever is responsible for things meteorological, was having a belly laugh at last week's Chelsea Flower Show. A much- trumpeted theme this year at the Royal Horticultural Society's prestigious event was tackling drought. But not a sniff of aridity could be detected during the first days of the show. Rain poured from the sky, coursed along the roads and paths in the four-and-a-half- hectare (11-acre) grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and pounded every centimetre of once-grassy verges into miry margins. The nearest tube station, Sloane Square, was flooded briefly on the Wednesday morning. And when the clouds took a breather between bouts of throwing water around, the wind took over.
It was demoralising for visitors, but it must have been heartbreaking for the makers of the several dozen outdoor display gardens. Many of the designers had taken the drought theme seriously, filling their gardens with plants that need very little moisture: herbs, grey-leaved and furry-foliaged species, Mediterranean and other dry-climate inhabitants. Such creations are best when the sun is splitting the stones and releasing aromatic oils from fragrant vegetation, not when pelting rain is turning everything to mush.
We felt especially sorry for the people in GardenAfrica. This was a captivating re-creation of a township shamba, with ornamental plants and food crops growing side by side in the red-brown earth, and where everything - from the oil-drum compost bins to the bits of string used to secure the border fencing - was recycled. The site was on a gradient, so steps had been devised from old tyres packed with soil. But instead of the desired roundels of caked earth, the effect was of an arrangement of rubber-rimmed mud pies.
The 46 display gardens - 19 large "show" gardens, and 27 smaller "courtyard", "chic" and "city" gardens - were a diverse bunch, from the gorgeously chaotic GardenAfrica to Andy Sturgeon's highly structured garden for Cancer Research UK, with its long, rectangular, turquoise swimming pool topped with an oval slatted pavilion. The dyed-in-the-wool traditional English garden was there, too, in Chris Beardshaw's gentle Growing for Life, which was based on an early-20th-century garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll and Thomas Mawson.
The antipodes were again represented this year by the 100 per cent Pure New Zealand Garden and Fleming's Nurseries Australian Garden. The former, designed by Xanthe White, suggested the movement of water from rivers, lakes and streams to the ocean that edges the black sand beaches on the west coast of Auckland. There was much clever use of glass and sculpture, and native species. But the black sand - especially in the rain - looked unfamiliar and uncomfortable to our Irish eyes.
The Australian offering was a tribute to a "laid-back lifestyle", complete with outdoor kitchen, dining room and white-upholstered seating area (just add rain). It had a rather grand air of Utopian suburbia, but we forgave it that (and a giant stuffed koala, and a hard-to-elude didgeridoo player), because of the several regal specimens of Xanthorrhoea preissii, the Australian grass tree. These extraordinary plants - with charred black stems and tufted heads - rose from thick carpets of strappy-leaved grasses, Dianella and Ophiopogon, which, along with the sword-like phormiums and astelias, lent a minimal and masculine air to the space.
On the other side of the gender divide, you couldn't get much more feminine than Marney Hall's and Heather Yarrow's 4Head Garden of Dreams, where a gargantuan grass-and-chamomile woman, splendid of hip and bosom, lay dreaming at the edge of a stony brook. Her traffic-stopping magnificence eclipsed the masterful planting around her, so that most visitors will have missed the prettily combined bluebells, lily-of-the-valley, ferns and other delicate woodlanders.
There were no such distractions in another beautiful woodland garden, the Lake Forest Garden Club's Ravine Garden: Gift of the Glacier, with its tumbling mountain stream and native American flora, including lady slipper orchids and trilliums. One of its designers, Frank Gardner, explained that it was based on a ravine just north of Chicago. "It's not the kind of garden that most people are used to here." Maybe not, but we found ourselves returning again and again just to refresh ourselves in its atmosphere.
There was more Americana in Savills Garden, a clean-lined space that was inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois. Chalky-stemmed birches ascended pillar-like from a dense underplanting of perennials and grasses, and complemented the all-white, modernist garden building. One of its designers, Philip Nixon, is a former Blackrock College student, which, naturally, made us want to bestow on him our alternative-best-in-show award.
But, after much discussion, our panel of two awarded the invisible trophy to Tom Stuart-Smith's romantic and sensational Daily Telegraph Garden. A muted purple and silver sea of perennials - including iris, allium, salvia, catmint and lamb's ears - was topped by the shimmering spray from waves of Stipa gigantea. Several shrubby Viburnum rhytidophyllum had been pruned up to reveal brown knobbly knees and fawn-coloured felted undersides of leaves. A rusted steel wall (sounds awful, looked awesome) picked up these muted tones, and made a perfect foil for the purply perennials.
The Royal Horticultural Society judges also deemed Stuart-Smith's garden the best in show. And they gave their best-garden award in the city category to one of our favourites, too: Caspar Gabb's the Green Room, a tiny and verdant space hung with mosses, ferns and lush, big-leaved plants - the perfect place to unwind at the end of the day.
But there was no time for that, because there was still the Great Pavilion to see, with its 100-plus nurseries, floral displays and educational exhibits. Among the latter, a stand devoted to brassicas demonstrated how the versatile plants may produce not just edibles but also biodiesel and surfboards.
The massive covered space is overwhelming. It is a veritable temple of flora, where gardeners gather to worship the best specimens of everything that man can grow: bowers of headily fragrant roses, clatters of drumstick alliums, platoons of tulips, miniature meadows of grasses, fields of lavender, groves of sacred trees, conclaves of sinister orchids and carnivorous plants, clusters of ancient, gnarled bonsai.
About 80 new plants were introduced at the show. Hillier's offered, among others, a black-eyed Euphorbia characias called 'Black Pearl'; Avon Bulbs had a sky-blue Camassia 'Magdalen'; the large rose and clematis breeders presented about a two dozen new roses and clematis between them. The French iris breeder Cayeux made a patriotic song and dance about its new bearded iris, 'Réussité'. Its "red, white and blue" flower looked a lot like orange, white and mauve (or even purple) to our eyes. But that's Chelsea for you: a dash of blarney mixed in with lashings of excellence.
WHAT'S HOT AT CHELSEA
Garden themes and trends
• Water conservation • Gardening sustainably • Recycled materials • Hand-built stone walls • Pre-rusted steel walls or features •Glass: walls, sculptures, paving slabs •Roof gardens •Outdoor fireplaces or fire pits (despite all the eco-unfriendly carbon they send into the atmosphere)
Plants
• Arisaema species • Equisetum hyemale: one of the horsetails, also known as scouring rush •Irises •Alliums • Grasses: breeze-blowable kinds such as giant oats (Stipa gigantea) and Mexican feather grass or ponytails (S. tenuissima) • Drought-proof plants • Meadowy planting (tall airy species interlaced with wispy grasses) • Cottage garden plants (foxglove, hardy geranium, allium, catmint) • Jungly planting (banana, palms, Tetrapanax and other big-leaved species) • Native plants •Herbs and healing plants •Mediterranean species such as olive, grape, fig, Italian cypress
THE IRISH TIMES ALTERNATIVE CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW AWARDS
Best in show: The Daily Telegraph Garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith
Garden we'd most like to take home: Caspar Gabb's The Green Room
Best smelling display: The Sun newspaper and Writtle College's towering and highly perfumed pyramid of 'Hot Cakes', a 10-week stock
Most rejuvenating slice of nature: Lake Forest Garden Club's Ravine Garden: Gift of the Glacier
Ray of sunshine: Rougham Hall Nurseries for its display of determinedly cheerful, sunny Icelandic poppies interspersed with storm-cloud-like purple alliums
Nimby award: The scraggy-looking glass sculpture and split-level water feature in the Leeds City Council Garden. Not in my back yard, thanks
Jump on the bandwagon award: The Sunday Mirror Da Vinci Garden
Chelsea Flower Show spoilsport award: The weather - it rained, a lot