RHS Chelsea Pavilion (2014)

The large pavilion at RHS Chelsea is as much a part of any day there as the show gardens are and I spent about an hour and a half in there in which time I took 110 photographs.

Whittling those down to just seven was a brutal task and I have tried to select the pictures with the most impact. This meant that I had to discard lots of perfectly good photos of flower stalls but at least a lot of them have found a home on Facebook or Flickr.

The pavilion was laid out in a grid, more or less, and I systematically went up and down all of the aisles to be sure of seeing every stand.

That sounds a simple and obvious plan but it was not without problems. The grid was not uniform with some double-sized stalls cutting across the paths. In going up and down I passed most of the stalls twice so there was a lot of repetition. I also had to go from side to side frequently to see the other two sides of the more interesting stalls.

There was a lot of variety in the Pavilion, possibly more than in the gardens outside, and so while the walk was quite regimental and orderly what I saw was just the opposite, a constant stream of pleasant surprises.

One of the biggest surprises was a collection of floral dresses displayed in one of the corners. This was not quite my favourite dress but it is my favourite photo of the dresses. The other dresses were less full and long and thin shapes do not photograph well, not even in portrait (which I try to avoid using).

Every time that I have been to Chelsea there has been a large and exotic display from Thailand, and this was no exception. This year it was called “Thailand: Our Pride, Our Monarch and Our Cultural Heritage".

These displays are not really my sort of thing but they work well for me when surrounded by other floral displays that are more in the English tradition. I suspect that the Thais find all our displays weird.

Another favourite of mine was the large and display of flowers, fruit and vegetables arranged in four pyramids of different colours. From a distance the impression was of size and brashness and as I approached I could start to see the shapes that made the whole until I was right next to it and could wallow happily in the detail on the individual items.

There was so much more that I could have shown, even ignoring the many stalls that just did flowers. There was a Peter Rabbit, a family of foxes, a Punch and Judy show, a bicycle, an aeroplane and a horse, as well as the more usual greenhouses, garden seats and watering cans.

Above all there were flowers everywhere. Flowers of all shapes, sizes and colours. And that is why the RHS Chelsea Pavilion was such a delight.

RHS Chelsea Gardens (2014)

I had decided some time ago not to go to RHS Chelsea this year. Having been there in 2010, 2011 and 2012 I left that I had seen enough of the grand show-piece gardens for a while and would leave it for a few years until fashions had changed a little.

I was also a little wary of going as it is quite an intense experience with so much to see, a deceptively little amount of time to see it all and with thousands of other people all trying to do the same thing at the same time in the same space.

Then I got the offer of a cheap all-day ticket through work and I changed my mind and went.

My plan was to go early when it was slightly less busy even if that meant getting up earlier on a Saturday than I would normally get up for work during the week.

The weather forecast was diabolical which I thought was a good thing. It was not going to stop me and it might deter a few from going or force them to shelter in the Pavilion. I was well prepared with plenty of warm clothing, a good coat, an umbrella and a bag filled with spare camera batteries and SD cards, and also a spare camera.

Plenty of other people were undeterred by the heavy rain too but it was quiet enough that I could get to see all of the gardens close-up and from any angle that I wanted.

The other bonus of the rain was that many of the people wore the free M&G cagoules which, being white, disappeared in to the background much better than most normal clothing does. People who go to gardens in bright red or yellow outfits are one of the banes of my life.

The Pavilion was the centre of the site with the main gardens and stall circled around it. With plenty of time available I took the safe option of going around the path around the pavilion twice, once looking at things on the inside and then on the second pass at things on the outside.

There were a couple of places where the path divided and I had to be careful not to miss anything. I think I succeeded but obviously there is no way of checking. I suppose that I could have bought a guide, but that would have been cheating.

The one thing that I did buy was a Daily Telegraph cloth bag. Technically I bought the newspaper inside it and the bag was free but I prefer to think of it the other way round.

M&G, the main sponsors, were giving bags away and it was fun to watch the ladies fight over them. There was no shortage of bags it was more a question of how long you were prepared to wait for one of the people giving them away to come near you. Of course, I got one of those too.

After a couple of hours the rain stopped and against all predictions the sun came out. Luckily by then I had a large M&G bag to put by now unwanted coat in. How had the Met Office got that so wrong?

The unexpected sunlight changed the conditions dramatically and so I walked all around the gardens once again to take even more pictures, which is OK as that is what I went there to do.

Walking the gardens was tiring work and I paused momentary once for a coffee and later for a beer. These were only pauses and I drank as I walked rather than fighting for one of the wet benches to sit on. The queues for both the coffee and the beer were quite short which reinforced the impression that there were slightly fewer people there than usual.

The surprising thing for me was the similarity between the gardens with almost off of them sporting wild flowers and rocks. There were fewer structural devices than I recall from previous years and certainly much less use of brash colours.

The days when Diarmuid Gavin plonked several tons of orange steel in to a garden seemed to have passed. I do not particularly mourn those days but I would have liked to see something a little more outrageous.

That's not to say that I did not like Chelsea, far from it. It kept me walking through the sun and the rain for a full five hours. And I took 367 photos along the way so there was clearly plenty there that I loved.

I may not go to RHS Chelsea again next year but I think that I'll be back before too long.

RHS Chelsea Flowers (2012)

The show gardens grab most of the attention at the RHS Chelsea Show and that is unfair as the displays of flowers in the large Pavilion are just as much part of the day out.

The Pavilion is laid out on a grid (more or less) and that means that it is fairly easy to come up with a route that takes in every stand. The hard part is keeping to the plan and resisting all temptations to veer off course to another stand that catches the eye.

There is just so much to see and enjoy that it is even harder to pick just a few pictures out than it is for the show gardens so I have decided to go for the more exotic and unusual. That's not to say that they are better than the roses, tulips, foxgloves, orchids and all the other flowers on show, it is just that I needed some way of filtering the pictures.

This is the display sponsored by Waitrose and is very similar to the one they've had in previous years, but why change a winning formula? What I like about the display is the way that they use anything that has the right colour, such as the pears in the bottom right.

The foreign displays are, obviously, even more exotic that their UK cousins with their unusually shaped flowers. I think that this display is from South Africa, not that it really matters if, like me, all you want to do is appreciate the shapes and colours.

Last year we had floral elephants and this year the same people had another large Asian themed display with, amongst other things, this dragon boat.

I do not have a clue what these are or where they came from. I like them a lot though.

This display brought lots of admiring gasps from visitors while i was there, and understandable so. The who display was a recreation of one of Monet's water lily paintings, you can see the bridge in the background on the right, and the centrepiece was the painting itself composed in petals.

RHS Chelsea Gardens (2012)

I was a late to the RHS Chelsea party going for the first time in 2010, and then it took a cash incentive to get me there.

But that was a lesson quickly learnt and I have been back in the two years since then, choosing to take a day's holiday each time to do so.

Chelsea means an early start, holiday or no holiday, and i was walking through the gates a few minutes before the official opening time of 8am.

Many people had the same idea and it was reasonably busy even at that ungodly hour.

The site at Chelsea is vast and a plan of attack is needed. I passed the shops that greet you as soon as you enter and headed for the main avenue and the main show gardens which were my main purpose in going.

There were a number of small gardens too and these were some of the more interesting, possibly because the smaller size allowed the garden designer to focus on, and deliver, just one theme whereas a larger garden needs more themes to fill the space and the mix of themes may not always mix well.

An early sign of what was to come was seen in this small garden.

The planting was wild and thickly planted with small subtle flowers that added joyous colour without swamping the garden.

And because this is Chelsea there has to be something else in the garden besides the plants and so we have the stepped hedge built in to the back wall and a spiralling  statue with coloured vanes that gradually change colour as they rise.

I really like the overall effect which is why garden makes it in to this brutally culled collection of photographs from the day.

Another small garden was possibly the most interesting.

The floating disks are the first thing that catch your eye. They have no visible means of support as they sit on columns of falling water.

Looking beyond the disks there is so much more to see, including (just off to the left) a presenter pedalling to power the garden.

As an aside, TV presenters is one of the hazards of taking photos at Chelsea as they are allowed to wander in to the gardens that the rest of us can only look at. On several occasions, including this one, I had to modify the shot that I wanted to take, or even move on to another garden, to avoid having a person ruin the shot.

There were some common themes among the large gardens too, such as a sunken rectangular pond. What is nice about this one is all the other water in the garden; there is a sheet of water falling down the grey stone at the back, those are little fountains along the hedge on the right and (hard to see) there is a series of fountains along the bench below.

Derelict buildings were popular too.

There were several sheds, greenhouses and even a caravan.

Likewise the wild meadow look was everywhere and the two prominent colours were orange and purple.

All the gardens were lovely but they were probably a bit too similar and that diminished the impact of each one.

Possibly my favourite garden followed most of the rules and somehow managed to remain special.

There is sunken water, white rectangular walls,wild planting and orange flowers but the blues of the summer house, water and flowers are distinctive.

This garden got a lot of attention for all the right reasons.

Yes it has sunken rectangular water, white walls and purple flowers but it also has a large amount of brown circular metal that breaks up the shape of the garden, provides contrast to the planting and creates interesting shadows.

That said, putting a large bit of metal in to a garden to make it interesting sounds like cheating, or at least an admission that the rest of the garden has failed.

Next door a similar trick worked better.

Again it's possible to argue that there is little that is original in the garden. What is different, however, is are the large wooden arches that help to zone the garden, give it some height and also a reflection of the browns in the planting.

Diarmuid Gavin can be relied on to be original and this year he provided a seven storey tower built from scaffolding with plants growing through it, on it and down it.

Its size alone was enough to grab attention and a closer look revealed all sorts of things going on, some of which had something to do with gardening.

I admire the concept but the scaffolding dominated over the planting so I found it lacking as a garden.

I would have loved to go up it though.

Of course there was a lot more to the gardens at RHS Chelsea than I have hinted at here. To fill in the gaps, simply go yourself. It's recommended.

Chelsea flowers

There is just so much to see at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show that even splitting it across two posts you can just hint at the range of delights on show.

My previous post covered the show gardens that is what most of the TV coverage focuses on but the large marque packed with flowers is just as important, if not more so.

Especially when it is raining.

There is a wide mix of stalls starting with those from specialist nurseries keen to show off what they can do.

This stunning collection of tulips is just one example, albeit a rather nice one. Elsewhere there were lupins, cacti, acers, orchids, alliums and everything in between.

There were probably too many acers and alliums, to be honest, they were everywhere this year.

Some of the displays were slightly more mixed and more structured showing off the flowers in a more garden-like setting.

There seemed to be two main themes here, the English Country Garden and the Overseas Exotic. In this later category we we treated to strange (to us) plants from South Africa and the West Indies.

I made the mistake of offering to take a group photograph of one of the overseas visitors only to be handed a separate camera from every one of them to take their own picture. That took quite a while!

And then there were the two large show pieces.

The more exotic of these was an India themed tableau composed of flowers.

The pink, yellow and turquoise flowers make this a hard-to-ignore display even if they are not the colours that you would choose for your living room.

Striding across the carpet of flowers is a group of elephants. Elsewhere there are lions and fish.

There is a lot of detail to savour which means getting up close and parading the display slowly to capture everything that it has to offer.

More traditional, and more to my liking, was an equally large display of flowers, fruits and vegetables that rejoiced in its colour. Look carefully and you can see orange and red peppers, green apples and red tomatoes.

It's this imaginative use plants to create a rich feast of colour that made this a centrepiece of the whole show and a firm reminder that there is a lot more to Chelsea than the formal show gardens.

Five Chelsea gardens

Having dipped my toe into the RHS Chelsea Flower Show water last year it was an easy decision to go again this year. I even took a day's holiday to do so.

This year I went on the Thursday rather than the Saturday, managed to get there a little earlier (about quarter to nine) and the weather was kinder with the heavy rain holding off until I was in the marquee.

I was there for something like seven hours and still did not manage to see everything.

With such an embarrassment of riches it has been difficult to select which highlights to write about. So I've cheated a little. This post is just about the show gardens and I'll write about the displays in the marquee separately.

It's easy to see why I chose this one, it's the colours. Oranges were popular this year and so too were fox gloves. This looks like a fairly traditional cottage garden set against a rather nontraditional coloured cottage. The combination just works.

Structure defines this garden, though I like the planting too. Grey slate featured in a few of the modern gardens but nowhere was it more effective than here where it is bent to look like a curling stone with the handles becoming garden seats.

The Irish Sky Garden by TV gardener Diarmuid Gavin gained attention for the large purple metal cage that was lifted by a crane but I felt that the outrageous centrepiece detracted from the rest of the garden where a metal path weaved through dense grass with pools of water.

This garden combined old and new features wonderfully. The stone walls and wild flowers speak of tradition and you can imagine shepherds swapping yarns at the end of the day. The contrast comes from the circular pools and bright blue Summer House.

Nothing says modern garden quite like turquoise artificial grass, and this garden had lots of it. There were lots of flowers too which lessened the shock. They even managed to compliment each other somehow.

Chelsea Flower Show 2010 - more than flowers

I had been half-tempted to go to the Chelsea Flower Show before but never enough to actually get around to doing anything about it. The difference this year was that somebody at work organised a group booking, and a good discount too.

Expecting the place to be busy I aimed to be there soon after opening time, 8am, but laziness conspired against me and I did not get there until around 8:30 by which time the crowds were streaming in but not yet in such numbers to make the experience unpleasant.


My expectations were very much set by years of watching the extensive coverage on BBC TV and so I knew about the show gardens.

More than that, it soon became apparent that I knew all of the show gardens as there are not actually that many and they had all had plenty of air time.

But seeing them in the flesh, so to speak, was so much better than watching Alan Titmarsh walking through them.

The gardens varied greatly in concept and design to it is impossible to pick one as being typical so I'll pick my favourite instead. The still water and white stone reminded me immensely of China but with a gorgeous modern twist.


As well as the show gardens there was a stupidly wide range of things that you could buy to put in your own.

There were the expected pots, sheds, summer houses, benches and classic sculptures but there was much more than that.

I loved a lot of the modern art that would fit in the home just as well as it would in the garden.

Among this was a collection of large artificial flowers which I could just about imagine sitting on my front lawn and a tall statue of two mermaids with long tails, that reminded me so much of Rusalka at Glyndebourne last year, which needed a larger garden to adorn that I could offer. I probably could not afford it anyway!


There was a surprise, and it was a pleasant one.

I knew there was a marquee with flowers in it but I did not realise just how big or sumptuous that would be.

As with the gardens, it is impossible to pick a single photo that is typical of the floral displays but here's one that I like from the two hundred or so that I took in just a few hours.

The rain taunted the day forcing people in to the marquee at times but did not do enough to ruin the day. But it's a big site with plenty to see and eventually tiredness won and so after a happy five hours I headed more for a cup of tea, some jam sandwiches and a little rest before Dr Who.

Chelsea was a lot of fun and I am delighted that I finally broke my flower show duck but I think that I'll go back to just watching it on the telly next year.