The plants are the thing

Flower Show was much better than I expected

- Charles Quest-Ritson

LAST week's RHS Chelsea Flower Show was much better than I expected. The emphasis was upon plants and how to grow them. You may think that growing plants is what the RHS is all about, but far too much attention has been paid in recent years to overdesigned gardens from which we learn little or nothing. Of course, every show garden should have something to tell us-something we can copy (or avoid) for ourselves but, until this year, I would have said that most of these showpieces-those advertisements for sponsors and designers are not only wickedly expensive to make, but also perfectly hideous.

Not now. This year's show gardens had a minimum of hard structure and a maximum of plants softly coloured herbaceous plants, British natives (me weeds, but nicely worked in), and countryside trees (hawthorns, willows and hornbeams), and shapely ferns and grasses. Journalists like to speculate about which garden will be judged Best in Show. I fancied the chances of a spectacular tourde-force designed by Sarah Eberle fed by very high waterfalls and embellished by amazing sculptures and dense, bold-but-green plantings. Yet my ability to spot a winner is no better with gardens than with horses and Mrs Eberle's masterpiece was beaten by a jumble of rewilding and beaver dams. I am not alone in thinking that the judges got it wrong.