JOLLY GOOD SHOW

Chelsea Flower Show might be the oldest in the world but every May it’s host to a brave new world of garden design on an epic scale

As the old saying goes, an Englishman’s home is his castle – so what of his (or hers, or any other pronoun’s) garden?

Well, in literal terms obviously it’s the space outside, the lungs that surround. A place to sun, to play, to cook, to unwind, to work, and to take a deep breath away from the stresses and strains of everyday life. It’s a place dedicated to admiring the view, taking in the changing seasons, and where the never-ending yet polite tussle unfolds of taming nature - bending it to our will.

From Cicero to Sitting Bull, Thomas More to Alice Walker, since ancient times humans have waxed ever so lyrical about the joys, the rigours and the absolute delights to be found in that space outside. For the everyday gardener, the challenges and rewards tend to centre mostly on keeping the chaos at bay - pruning, weeding, dead heading, pollarding and planting. It’s all about working with nature to keep it under some sort of control.

Trips to the garden centre to buy bulbs, bags of compost, gardening gloves and replace the occasional fork feel like trips to the supermarket - essential and workaday. Yet when you’re choosing between different shades of wax begonias, you’re doing much more than simply selecting a bedding plant – you’re picking and choosing from a curated selection that reflects garden trends from all over the world.

Melting Ice

While the ice block cube centrepiece to 2022’s Plantsman Ice Garden (see left) looked a little like aliens had sneakily landed in plain sight, the message was even more dystopian. Since 1994, 28 trillion tons of ice have disappeared from the earth’s surface with the melting permafrost mirrored by the real-time melting of this garden’s 15-tonne ice cube. While it’s making a serious point about climate catastrophe, The Plantsman’s Ice Garden also marks the release from their icy resting place of seeds buried over 30,000 years ago which are now being successfully germinated by Siberian scientists.

Perchance To Dream

In 2006, the migraine relief people 4head, partnering with medal winners Marney Hall and Heather Yarrow, created the serene and tranquil Garden of Dreams. In a woodland setting complete with babbling brooks and encircled by a thorny hedge, its ‘Island of Reflection’ featured a reclining topiary woman, with rushes for hair, deep in slumber, aided, no doubt, by the borage, lavender and chamomile all around - herbal remedies for busy minds and broken sleep.

Carved In Stone

James Bassoon’s 2017 M&G garden divided the critics for many reasons – slabs of quarried stone from Malta with scrub plants of the kind you might see in very dry ground, alongside the ‘best in show’ award initially bemused public and press alike. But Bassoon’s thoughtful, intuitive planting (it’s all about where human meets nature), native tree, shrub and flower valiantly taking ownership of the terrain made it a moving and unusual addition to the Show.

Eager Beaver

Look right. A slate slab dry stone wall, an old timber walkway, an old woodshed alongside lazy river - anyone who’s ever enjoyed a big old yomp in the English countryside could be forgiven for thinking they’re taken an un-signposted detour into the woods. However, 2022’s Rewilding Britain Landscape is all about the essential part beavers play in our ecosystem. By turns educational and nostalgic, the riverside planting and artfully constructed beaver dam (and old wooden shed) won this garden best in show. While a brick gatehouse-like folly with rising roof, dancing hedges, revolving lawns, a very inventive shed and the brightest of bed give a sideways take on the English cottage garden.

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

While it’s a region lauded for spectacular terrain, 2019’s Welcome to Yorkshire Garden designed by Mark Gregory was also a tribute to an industrial heritage and enduring spirit that’s quintessentially of that place. With its drystone walls, lock keeper’s canal-side cottage complete with actual, fully functioning lock, and wonderful diversity of native wild and cultivated flora, it was a pleaser of crowd and critic alike.

According to award-winning garden designer (and creator of Chelsea Flower Show 2019 gold medal winning Resilience Garden) Sarah Eberle FSGD, “you can date a garden by its plants”. A sentiment with which Cleve West MSGD, concurs. “Grasses were a novelty when I started designing. Today I can’t imagine not using them.”

Dedicated followers though they are, fashion isn’t just about the plants, stemming (pardon the pun) instead from trends in lifestyle. James Scott, MSGD explained that last century “people viewed their gardens simply as a place to be gardened” but that today our outside spaces are much more an extension of our homes – to be shaped, landscaped, designed, styled and finished in keeping or contrast with that look and feel.

Regardless, trends have always been a big part of gardening, especially when it came to the great gardens of yesteryear. Around the time BC turned to AD, Romans brought their classic enclosed courtyard designs with them to the UK – adaptations to account for the weather included bringing much of the al fresco socialising safely indoors but, while they may have mourned their olive groves, vineyards and fig trees, their orchards absolutely flourished here.

In Medieval times gardeners grew fruit, veg, herbs and medicines, while separate spaces were set aside to feast the eyes (on flowering shrubs mainly) and calm the mind. The Tudors, unsurprisingly, were all about show, ornamental designs favouring mazes (Hampton Court springs to mind) and elaborate fishponds, segueing into the formal landscaped gardens of the 17th century.

Georgian times favoured experience – open vistas, large lakes and sweeping avenues spoke of natural grandeur while fancy follies added a playful sensibility. Victorian trends were rather overblown; riots of blooms (ideally from exotic outposts of empire), balustrades, fountains, hothouses (for those pinched cuttings and tropical fruits), and acres of lake and ornamental pondage.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that gardens became ubiquitous. Initially spare yet stately (arts and crafts influenced) this aesthetic married with mostly natural-looking plants. The first genuine

Plastic Fantastic

One of the Show’s most controversial; creating James May’s 2009 garden, Paradise in Plasticine, took a village. Artists, school children, Chelsea pensioners, even Jane Asher toiled together to shape their masterpieces, presided over by a bust of plasticine inventor, William Harbutt and flanked by lawn, fruit trees, borders, vegetable patch and a full picnic tea, all in the hyper-bright children’s modelling putty. Visitors loved it – fellow garden creators less so. In an act of masterful diplomacy, the RHS awarded the garden a plaque made of, yep, plasticine.

English Eccentrics

When Harrods wanted to celebrate the best of British eccentricity, they turned to Irish-born crowd pleaser, Diarmuid Gavin. Taking inspiration from English cartoonist, artist and imagineer of the whimsical contraption, Mr W Heath Robinson, the resulting Harrod’s British Eccentrics Garden featured a brick gatehouselike folly with rising roof, dancing hedges, revolving lawns, a very inventive shed and the brightest of beds - a sideways take on the English cottage garden.

consumer trend – the rock garden – was universally popular (slices of grey rock piled up with hardy alpine plants poking through) right through until the mid 1980s and dominated many gardens at early Chelsea Flower Shows.

Once the largest flower show on earth (a title now held by Hampton Court) Chelsea yet remains the oldest and most prestigious. Launched in 1862 as the Great Spring Show, brainchild of the Royal Horticultural Society, RHS (the gardening charity founded in 1804 with seven members – today it boasts over 500,000) the show took place in one of the society’s own gardens, in Kensington.

Removed for a stint to Temple Gardens, in 1912 the event was further relocated into its current location, the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, before being renamed after its new locationand The RHS Chelsea Flower Show was born. And, aside from a year or two during each world war and this century for Covid, the show has opened its doors every year since.

There’s a plethora of fabulous facts from the Chelsea Flower Show. It once boasted the world’s largest tent – a marquee erected in

1951, which measured an incredible 3.5 acres and when decommissioned in 2000 was turned into 7000 bags, aprons and jackets.

Gnomes have always been banned (as is fake grass) with one exception – in 2013 the gnome ban was lifted to allow luminaries from Elton John to Helen Mirren to paint one each, to be exhibited and sold for charity.

Main Avenue’s famous plane trees simply puff out pollen throughout May and everybody duly sneezes and wheezes their way through the show – it’s known as the Chelsea Flu.

Despite the thousands of exhibitors showing all manner of plants in the various vast marquees (best in show are selected by 100 experts every year), it is the gardens that have always been the star. And they are becoming more elaborate than ever. If you can, we urge you to go to the show.

Chelsea flower show 2023 is open to visitors 23-27 May, tickets are available from the RHS and sell out fast. The RHS host many other shows and events throughout the year. rhs.org.uk

Tall Storeys

“Design a spectacular garden, please, superstar designer, Diarmuid Gavin”, said Irish sponsors, Westland Horticulture. “A seven-storey pyramid, you say? With a different garden on each level? Ascended by lift? With a tubular slide to leave by if you dare? Perfect…” And so, it came to pass. Sadly, logistics denied the general public the chance to ascend 2012’s Westland Magical Tower Garden and exit by slide, but on press and preview days the queue was committed, with many the Chelsea pensioner being denied a slide on account of his advanced years.

Inspired by the impossibly glamorous golden age of cocktails, we launch our latest menu at The Sidecar, introduced by award-winning cocktail maker and bar manager, Oisin Kelly

Designed as a ‘modern take on a ‘30s cocktail bar’, The Sidecar at The Westbury is a jewel of a bar and eloquent tribute to the fabulousness of Art Deco and the energy and the optimism of an extraordinary bygone era.

The 1920s is a decade that captivated the entire century that followed. A decade in which we the people shrugged off the shackles of war and convention (for women, corsets were binned, hair was bobbed and waved, hemlines rose), and came together to charleston, tango and lindy hop into a brighter, bolder future.

There was an almost palpable spirit of optimism in the two decades between world wars. Fashion was democratised, with ready-to-wear putting choice into many more people’s reach and the stylised look and feel of Art Deco (imported from France) added a gilded modernity to design.

While we could have a drink this side of the pond – and women joined men in that – Stateside, prohibition was in full swing (1920-33). On both sides, the act of drinking assumed a decadence and a sense of urgency that made it all the more intoxicating.

Coming from the USA, cocktails became a hugely popular way of consuming their contraband – partly to disguise the necessity of using bathtub spirits, but mainly to breathe theatre into a new genre of consumption. Necessity may have been the mother of that invention in that case, but cocktails have never wavered in popularity in the ten decades since.

Before such a febrile backdrop, sharpened by uncertainty, irreverent wit and satire became cultural currency - holding a mirror up to the establishment - poking fun and being amplified to the masses in newspapers and magazines of the day.

Anne Harriet Fish was a Bristol-born artist whose illustrations took her from the west country of her birth via London and Paris to the metropolitan energy of New York City, where she was published by the top magazines of her day - Vanity Fair, Vogue, Tatler, The Sketch and Punch. She didn’t just illustrate, she created her own character, a young woman named Eve, for Tatler, whose escapades were later published in the ‘Book of Eve’, which ran to three volumes.

When we were looking for a visual style that captured the essence of that time – the flapper, the Jazz Age - the witty pen drawings of Anne Harriet Fish made her illustrations a shoe-in for our new menu. To further evoke the era, we juxtaposed her cartoons with some of the pithiest quotes from the day, from the evergreen Dorothy Parker to the redoubtable Margot Asquith, the icon that is F Scott Fitzgerald to society snapper and man about town, Cecil Beaton.

The creation, evolution and perfecting of the cocktails took months (normal service, obviously, continued during this time). And if we were to share even a fleeting sense of the precise alchemy involved in the process, we simply had to speak to Oisin Kelly.

The man behind the concept, Oisin is a serial award-winning cocktail maker – though he’s best known to us as the bar manager of The Sidecar. Oisin heads up a team of 17 and eight of his best bartenders from all over the world were involved in the creation of these cocktails – each bringing their unique perspective.

The Alchemy

In every cocktail bar, there are the classics. The drinks a good cocktail barman can create with their eyes closed. Obviously, The Sidecar team does those to perfection. In addition, about once a year they brainstorm ideas for a concept and create a whole new menu to dance across the tastebuds of anybody wanting to try something a little bit different.

Here’s Oisin…

“With this menu every cocktail is built around a ‘pillar’ – with the flavours layered in total harmony. We’re also bringing those curious bottles – and bitters and herbaceous flavours - down off the high shelf and into the mix.”

“Take High Sobriety. Anyone who loves a gimlet or daquiri will love this. But we’ve used Ciroc vodka (from grapes) with bergamot Italicus Strega (herbal liquor), orange bitters, lemon, elderflower and frozen grapes in place of ice cubes – so it looks like a dirty martini, but the ‘ice’ doesn’t dilute and it has a unique sour, fruity flavour.”

“ Forbidden Fruit was created by our bartender from Columbia and is so much more than a fruity vodka sour – it’s all melon and saline, topped with layers of matcha and ginger foam. While Rockerfeller Touch is made using Gunpowder Gin from an independent Irish distiller (it was developed as a test spirit for whisky production and was so good it has recently become the biggest selling gin in the USA!), which we mix with lemon, sugar, and fresh basil, then clarify it overnight, for layers of distinctive flavour that’s surprising in a drink so clear.”

“ Voguette is a clarified milk punch – another clear liquid but this time flavoured with fresh coconut and pineapple like an ultralight pina colada – so you get all the flavours without that cloying richness. Beginner’s Luck spins off an espresso martini, but using a malty Irish whisky, our own coffee blend, spices, and lemon foam, anchored by Barolo (a rich Italian red) for amazing deep layered flavours.”

At The Doyle Collection we believe that, if unsure, of course one should ask ‘But is it Art?’. In the case of this eponymous cocktail, we’re quietly confident there can be no doubt. The fine rum and bittersweet orange vermouth are lifted by lychee, pineapple, orgeat (a sweet syrup marrying almonds and orange flower water) anchored by bitters – it’s a beautifully choreographed flavour dance.

Ace of Hearts is one for negroni lovers who fancy a dry yet fruity variation on their usual - pairing gin, calvados and martini with Swiss gentian bitters, plum bitters and apple and cinnamon cordial. One of our favourites, Girl’s Best Friend , introduces pisco infused with aromatic jasmine to rue berry (an aromatic cordial made from the fruit of an Ethiopian spicy mountain shrub), an ume fruit liquor (marzipan-y bitter shiso), saline and a fruity, minty soda.

Back to Oisin, “In addition to the new recipes, we’re looking at new ways to serve. Martinis come frozen to the table on our ornate, gilt martini trolley, where they’re shaken, poured, and garnished to order. In our quest for sustainability, we save all the citrus we squeeze and infuse the zest into sugar for the rims of our glasses, we freeze fruit in place of ice and dehydrated cherries into leather for optimal natural flavour. Basically, we spent months creating this new menu and could talk about our 16 new cocktails for hours, but, really, you have to taste them – and we cannot wait to share them with our guests”.