I didn’t go to London last spring specially to see the famous Chelsea Flower Show. But as long as I was stealing ten days from my own garden, I scheduled my London trip around the two days you could be admitted—for £27—if you were neither a royal nor a Horticultural Society member.
We were all there to see wonders. The show gardens entailed stupendous feats of uprooting, transporting, and restituating tons of rock and earth, full-grown trees, along with minutely matching moss on old stone walls. Yorkshire or Scots Crofters’ stone cottages were reconstructed along with their plunging becks, trickling burns, and small pack-horse bridges . Even more improbable were deserts, California vineyards, and a “derelict wing of a once-impressive brick-built mansion” nonchalantly represented as “an area for relaxing, dining, and entertaining,” the whole thing “visually striking whilst being highly practical.”
My reeling provincial brain tried to imagine a derelict mansion wing, even an impractical one, in my neighborhood, and failed. I had thought at a garden show I would find landscape hints or ideas for plants in tough soil. I was startled to find instead, sponsored by the Barbados Tourist Authority, a “chattel house” complete with a “slave bangle sculpted from box hedging .” Clearly my imagination is conventional, even pallid. I quailed before the task of creating a bit of Mt. Snowden out of “50 tonnes of Welsh slate boulders” and “200 tonnes of earth”—presumably also Welsh. And I lost my nerve altogether at the impudence of planting gnarled twenty-five-year-old California grapevines or old olive trees for four days in British soil.
Not that I lack materials. I live on a stone ridge in upstate New York with plenty of big rocks. How delightful it would be to have a stone cottage down by my evergreen garden. I’d forgo the matching of moss if I knew who would build it. I once owned an old barn with a laid stone foundation and chestnut flooring. But I couldn’t convince anyone, including the joint owner of my bank account, that it was worth what I see now would have been the trifling labor and expense of saving it. The most practical garden in the show boasted that its elements “can easily be packed away and relocated, including the lawn and the pond. This enables the homeowner to take the garden with them [sic ] when they move”—or sell it at “extra cost” to the new owners! A garden, more over, that “captures the majesty of the large old estates,” such as Hedingham Castle. How paltry my ideas about practicality have been and are . Even now I fail to see how to pack away my old barn pond with all its spring peepers and mosquitoes .
Actually I couldn’t see most of the exhibition gardens because when I arrived at the show I found all of Britain and half of North America there. Finally I gave up trying to get through the tremendous press of people and sat down on a stone wall beside a woman who was eating lunch. I had been longing to find out what ordinary people thought about paying £27 for a ticket to this astounding but largely invisible show. My wall companion said she had paid £40 for a ticket that included a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride from her home. “But this is my little treat,” she said, complacently glancing at the folk horde pushing past us. “I’m the main caretaker of me old dad. Can’t leave him. If anything happened to him I’d never forgive me-self.” I hardly knew what to respond. I’m not used to the idea that real people outside novels actually say, “me old dad.” She brushed the crumbs off her lap and said she was heading for the plant pavilion to see the sweet peas. Sweet peas! When right around the corner, according to the catalogue, was a garden planted to represent a tropical coral reef!
When I returned to my own gardens, I had to work like the devil to make up for my time off at the height of the gardening season. I planted my humdrum vegetables. We had a beautiful English summer with rain every week. When the tomatoes were growing nicely, I had to reclaim an area by a construction site that was all subsoil. No spade would go into the ground, so I resorted to the pick-axe, hacking out hard pan, carting it away, and trucking in plenty of compost. I worked early in the morning before the sun blazed too badly and then after dinner when the air cooled slightly. I struck no huge rocks, thank goodness. It looked nice when I finished, but I couldn’t think of a theme for it. I remembered the “Garden for Lovers” which the catalogue declared had “passionate planting.” Mine had been planted ploddingly, though, so I just call it the Pickaxe Garden. The stones bordering it are small, no moss yet, but they are easy to move and agreeably useful.
