Take a moment to close your eyes – to imagine a place where thousands of plants and flowers and all kinds of gardens surround you with their myriad colours, shapes and fragrances.
Now open your eyes: You are in London at the world famous Chelsea Flower Show. (And Canada had a starring role this year, when the Royal Bank’s water appreciation show garden won a silver-gilt award, placing between silver and gold.)
What a treat to visit more than 30 show gardens, artisan gardens and theme gardens – plus several hundred garden-related businesses. You admire their creativity – whether it’s a Winnie-the-Pooh sculpture, rotating trees or a clothing store’s mannequins with flowers for heads.
Indoors, the Great Pavilion houses some 200 flower, plant and related displays.
You marvel at four dozen dark yellow, pale yellow and white single and double daffodil varieties, you breathe in the fragrance of a dozen colours of hyacinths or of a rare orchid, you smile at the “slide salad” display promoting healthy eating by featuring a variety of salad veggies on a playground slide. You inspect the yellow/cream nodding heads of the Clematis chiisanensis Amber that was chosen as 2016 flower of the year.
The sponsoring Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has 445,000 members who spend an average of 10 hours a week gardening. No wonder the five-day show, now in its 103rd year, regularly sells out. (Scalpers were asking around $2,000 for a ticket, 20 times its face value.)
“We believe everyone should benefit from growing plants to enhance lives, build stronger, healthier, happier communities, and create better places to live,” said Sir Nicholas Bacon, RHS president.
Following my visit to the show several years ago, I described it as “a florist shop that goes on forever.” Only a shop that big could feature so many and varied attractions. For example:
• Some 460 flowers, ferns, grasses and bulbs (plus 100 hours of labour) went into the M&G Investments dress a model wore to reflect the theme of the variety in the M&G woodland show garden, which won one of the show’s seven gold medals.
• Health featured in several displays like the low allergy garden, with a variety of flowering plants, shrubs and trees not linked to allergies in humans. And Coventry University’s Healthy Garden, Healthy Gardener, with skeletons demonstrating the results of motion-capture technology to measure and analyze the effect of gardening on muscle strength, joint flexibility and postural stability.
• The Harrods British Eccentrics Garden featured trees and flowers – plus vegetation and other items that periodically spun around, bobbed up and down and performed other mechanical feats – more eccentric than one would expect from the venerable London department store sponsor.
But there was nothing eccentric about this year’s theme at the flower show, nothing cliché about taking time to smell the roses. Both can grow your health and happiness.
