SW3

At my age there are few firsts. Few good ones anyway. This week, I went to Chelsea Flower Show for the first time. I know I know, it’s flowers, you can’t eat them, and even though I discovered plenty of veg-heavy gardens and stands what there is to eat you’re not allowed to eat.

I went because I could (Press Day ticket, darling) and I went because I love a window into another world, and I went to meet Tamsin and Cinead from The English Garden (more on that in a bit), and to watch Emma T eat bacon, and to see what the whole thing was about. And to see if I got it.

First things first – I saw Rolf, so trainfare justified. I said hello to at least 4 famous people, having recognised them and in the same millisecond (ie the millisecond before I made the next step and recognised them as FAMOUS people) said hello. I have a strategy for such occasions: I figure they meet so many people they could never be certain that they didn’t know me, so I carry on chatting. Wife alright, yeah, yourself? Been doing much since that last series dived? Thought not.

Second things second – being the sort of day that’s essentially about something good, a celebration, a coming together, it’s always likely that you’ll come across more than one or two very fine people. I ran into an old work colleague from a dozen years ago, he the height of tanned french fashion, me clashingly less than resplendent in my coarse fair Englishness. I also finally met the enormously entertaining James Alexander-Sinclair who I’d previously only known in this fabulous world of blogland, and Jane Perrone from the Guardian who for some reason imagined me considerably less tall (do I blog in a short way I wonder?). She wore the same coat as Emma T, although there was no confusing the two as Jane could, I’m sure, eat a bacon sandwich while retaining the faintest modicum of decorum.

Third things things third- I can’t help a quiet feeling of being a bit dim. I loved the nursery stands…the producers, the growers, the nursery(wo)men…or at least a good number of them. The Jersey Growers stand (above) made me smile. I’m in no way a veg show goer, but it was perfection in it’s own just-so way. As was Jekka’s. And a good few others – including the Eden Project’s Key Garden, below. Some of the small gardens out on the periphery really caught my attention too. But it was the big show gardens (if that’s the right way to put it) that I wasn’t sure about. Some were awful, end of..and some were very clever – even a dumbo could see that, but few really grabbed me. Or was it that I just didn’t get it? Is it that I don’t have the gift of seeing in the right way? I’m genuinely not sure. With music, with films I have the mental equipment to understand, to see beyond the initial fluff, to see (say) Bladerunner as anything but just another sci-fi flick. Most people do I’m sure. But more than once I felt like I was staring at the Emperor, nude (or at least in some very poor slacks). As a teenager I didn’t get jazz – it sounded (as the great Eric Morecambe said in another context) like all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order – and most of the day I had a similar feeling. Perhaps, I wondered over a rather marvellous blueberry muffin, my currently ignorant self would soon acquire the appropriate understanding to perceive the Best In Show Daily Telegraph garden for the majesterial joy that it was commonly beheld.

It wasn’t that I hated the Telegraph garden, I just didn’t get the wild acclaim. By the end of the day I’d seen it many times, spotting the rather marvellous Adam Nicholson, without shoes and in what looked suspiciously like rugby socks, interviewing someone or other in the room that was at the garden’s centre. 5’ll get you 10 it was for the the Telegraph. By 3 when the proles had to go, I could see something ok about it, but I still didn’t get the fuss, the adulation that went with it from most people including the Gardeners World folk come the evening show. But by the end of the day I did have a sense that it wasn’t like the jazz thing, it felt more like prog rock: technically admirable in a male sort of way, not without some interest here and there, but too many notes, not necessarily in the right order. And it left me wanting a little more soul.

Going back next year mind.