With a spring in its step

Kathryn Bradley-Hole selects some of the many highlights of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which at long last returns to its traditional May slot

- Kathryn Bradley-Hole

APPROPRIATELY, in the year that celebrates both The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and COUNTRY LIFE’s 125th anniversary, the 2022 RHS Chelsea Flower Show’s overriding theme is the romanticised English rural landscape. Among the garden exhibits, there are hawthorn hedges galore and dozens of ‘woodland edges’ verdant with ferns, buttercups, granny’s bonnets and froths of cow parsley. There are gurgling brooks, whispering birches and wind-blasted pines rising among great boulders. Prepare to be drawn into rural scenes that suggest George Eliot’s Silas Marner, with its ‘nutty hedgerows’ and ‘orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty’.