AWAY: RHS Chelsea 2024

Reviewing 2024 ahead of attending 2025

[ VERY long post, you may need to click through and view it on the web to see it in full ]

Today’s review of last year’s Chelsea Flower Show is free to read. Paid subscribers will get to see my posts from Chelsea 2025, coming soon!

I forgot how much I hate Chelsea during Chelsea week.

I just popped over the river for coffee with a new friend, and was considering browsing around for a dress to wear to my best friend’s wedding (now only a month away, eep!) but the streets are overspilling with people.

Gangs of aspiring influences obstruct the pavements waiting to have their photo taken in front of each ‘Chelsea in Bloom’ installation. Hordes of well-dressed Boomers in battered Lock & Co hats throng around looking for a post-show glass of wine and somewhere to sit in the shade. And of course it is the time of year that the wealthy families of the UAE open up their Belgravia homes for the summer and fill the streets of SW1 with supercars.

In short, it is dreadful.

At the heart of the chaos - of course - is the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

Dating back to 1862, the Chelsea Flower Show is one of the stalwarts of the Great British calendar. The only horticultural event included in ‘the season’, for many it is a place to be seen as much as a place to see.

But RHS Chelsea is also - bizarrely - an industry award show. Like the Oscars it is one of those that has broken the bounds of its industry to become something even non-gardeners know about and follow with interest.

The biggest event in the Family Bar calendar is the Family Law Awards. While everyone knows that whichever set of chambers ‘generously’ sponsors the show, or sponsors a category, is likely to be well-regarded when it comes time to decide the winners, it is nonetheless considered prestigious and desirable (by some) to be nominated. The idea that anyone outside of the industry would have any interest in either the participants or the event itself is a strange one to say the least.

And yet, I spent a small fortune so that I can head across the river to the Show.

I was somewhat disappointed, upon receiving my show guide and map in the post, to see that there are fewer show gardens this year. Yes, yes, ok, there are all the balcony gardens, houseplant exhibits blah blah, I don’t care about those. I super don’t care about houseplants. And each year, it seems, the RHS will commit more and more of this crammed event space to retail. It is such a shame. I can go and buy a packet of seeds and a Niwaki spade anytime I want without paying the extortionate ticket price.

No, the reason I keep going is for the show gardens. The show gardens and the Great Pavilion. It is here that expert plantsmen, plantswomen, nurserymen, nurserywomen, designers, florists, and creators, do their best work in order to inspire the mind of punters like me, as well as to impress the judges.

As you know, I started gardening in early May two years ago. A couple of weeks after I started, I was at Chelsea Flower Show. I had listened to my Mum talk about it in hushed, reverent tones throughout my childhood, so I knew that if I was to be a gardener, this show was a Big Deal.

I have no idea how, but I lost all of my photos from that first show.

Last year, I was not about to make the same mistake. But then I got to the show and realised that my memory card was almost full…

Furious at my own stupidity and determined to remedy this run of undocumented shows, I bought myself a very last-minute ticket for the last day of the show and went back (armed with several memory cards) to go around again. You can easily tell which day is which because on the first it POURED with rain…

I took a huge amount of inspiration home with me. I also took home with me a Rosa ‘Sweet Siluetta’ from Peter Beales’ stand. Somewhere out in the ether is a photograph of me on my moped, trailing this large climbing rose behind me, that a man risked running out into traffic to take. ‘Sweet Siluetta’ is currently blooming away happily in my Battersea back garden.