Chelsea has finished for another year and we gardeners can get back to normal gardening. By that I mean cheap, dirty and low carbon. In truth, the Chelsea Flower Show is a flashy product for the rich and indolent metropolitan. The message is no need to sweat over the environment, absorb the remedial qualities of our wild gardens and, voila, don’t worry about global warming. Sniff the expensive flowers as you return to your private jets and gas-guzzling cars and flit between your various homes around the world. The monstrous Chelsea Flower Show has a carbon footprint bigger than a steelworks.

The RHS

This show means virtually nothing to the average gardener, like me, who digs their own garden, who actually uses a spade. Everybody is a garden designer in London and few, if any, are proper gardeners. Chelsea is a hangover from the Victorian rich man’s obsession with stealing plants from all around the world. These plant hunters are venerated and were nothing but toadies to the rich. The rich play with gardens, play with trees and then destroy the world with their carbon footprint. Firstly, all I could see on television was masses of plants, huge trees and even Scottish boulders, all shipped in using huge trucks. Secondly, where is the logic in any of this theatre, this fancy show, for saving the planet? Neither were the so called wild gardens even gardens, they were sops to the environment.

Chelsea monstrous Flower Show

Real gardens are not wild, they are either a place for flowers, and bees, or for producing food. These fads, which is this pretence that the environment matters when, in reality, they actually create vast amounts of carbon. Even the excuse that the so called gardens will be re-used somewhere else is an absurdity. Somebody needs to get a grip and that must be the RHS. They are not Greenpeace, they are gardeners or, at least, supposed to be. Let’s get back to real horticulture, buying masses of peat, chemicals and artificial fertilisers. Only joking!

PS – my photo is linum or fairy flax in my garden. The plant cost me a few pence on the internet