savourites #50: chelsea flower show edition

all the plants I'd have happily taken home (and those I did)

“Isn’t it nice,” wise gardening friend Andrew Timothy O’Brien commented the other day, “to return to your garden after Chelsea?” He’s right. I’m writing this on a balmy evening in the recently installed arbour (it’s a grand word for a bench with tall side bits, but I can’t think of anything else). The baby and I have had a lazy day, mostly because we’ve spent half the week at Chelsea and we’re both tired. He’s asleep in his bouncer beneath the quilt our friend made us. After the perfection and polish of the flower show there’s something deeply comforting about sitting among your own mess, of the things that need deadheading and the laundry drifting on the airer. It’s the horticultural equivalent of eating cereal for dinner after having a big lunch.

Still, this was a good year at Chelsea; everyone’s saying as much. For the first time, babies were allowed into the show ground and I took C, strapped and snoozing on my chest. Sarah Price’s Benton End-inspired garden was all anybody could talk about on press day and I wrote about it for The New Statesman. We were back on Wednesday to talk about women in horticulture, one of the themes of this year’s show and I wrote about how nice it might be for gender equality not to be a theme, for Gardens Illustrated, too.

Beyond all the gossip and the get-togethers, there were the plants. I always find Chelsea quite overwhelming: I never can get around the whole thing in a day, I always find I’ve missed something when I watch other people’s insights on social media. This is, therefore, hardly a conclusive list of the most interesting plants at the show. Instead they are the ones that caught my eye amidst all the happy chaos, which is the kind of plant you want in a garden.