Chelsea

 I had never been to the Chelsea Flower Show and it was on my bucket list. 

The idea of a bucket list is the epitome of everything I hate. I always get irrationally angry when I watch a film where someone is dying and they suddenly start to do all the things they didn’t do for the previous 70 years of their life. As if you’d have the energy. If you didn’t do them before then maybe there was a good reason. 

The Long Suffering Husband and I did make a FOMO list, though. I preferred to have a list of things I feared missing out on. Then my daughter has a list of thirty things she’s going to do before 30 and I thought that I could do 60 before 60 and give myself a few years. I am a shameless thief. 

I haven’t actually written the list yet but as we had tickets for Chelsea this year and had never been before I decided to put it at number one.

I am so glad I went. I absolutely loved it. Yes, it was crowded, there aren’t enough places to sit and if you are like me, you’ll come away feeling sad at the terribly uneven distribution of wealth in our country but….plants.

I like plants more than people.

You can also kill a plant without going to prison.

That’s not exactly true. People are great to watch. That was one of my favourite things. When people won prizes for their displays the ping of emotions rubbed off. It is the Oscars of the plant world without the speeches. Gardeners put on their best clothes, scrub the dirt from under their nails and have a grand day out. 

Even Monty Don was in a suit and tie, although he did still wear a scarf and as people kept saying, “Even in a suit, his trousers are too long. He should have got his mother to take them up for him.”

This year, the wild look was all the rage and the suffragette colours with a few dusky pinks or peaches were just my thing. Long toothed gardeners mimed spraying some of the show gardens with weed killer. However, my kind of messy gardening has suddenly become fashionable.

There was so much to love. Living walls, wild flower roofs (why isn’t it rooves?), terrariums, plants I’d never seen before (“You’ll see them all the time now,” the modest woman who had won her first gold medal said, “It’s what happens.”), sculptures, water features, nice hand cream in the toilets (more women’s than men’s!), women in floral dresses with pockets, information about bees, inspirational show gardens and they even had spaces in between showing what most people’s gardens actually look like.