MY GARDEN



As you can see, my garden looks practically like the ones at Chelsea.

So I do have some more photographs of my favorite garden at Chelsea, but I managed to save them as .nhm files, which Photoshop doesn't recognise. So as soon as I can manage to get those converted, I'll post them as well. The little gateway from my first post is part of my favorite garden.

These are some of the exhibits. As you can see, the bonzai grower goes with the more minimalist approach, whereas some of the flower growers go with big displays. It was not easy to get photographs in the exhibit hall. Also, I didn't want to spend so much time photographing that I ended up not seeing the whole show.



Pictures really can't do the carnivorous plants justice. Or at least, not when I'm holding the camera. These were fantastic.

This is what my back garden looks like, too. One must have a water feature.

I didn't think I liked pink flowers as a sort of general rule, until I saw the foxgloves at the show. There were a lot of pink foxgloves paired with white peonies, roses, or calla lillies, and somehow it didn't all come off like a bad wedding.

This one kind of cracked me up. The entire garden was gorgeous, with some really neat driftwood and that sort of thing. But everyone was standing around looking at the boobs. Which says something about life.






See that borage in the front left corner? I just planted some of that in my garden. It's about an inch tall. So excited!

CHELSEA, PART TWO

I am not going to edit that last post, because I am LAZY. Instead, I am going to write a little more about the show.

The Chelsea Flower Show, for those of you who don't know, is probably the most famous garden show in the world. They call it a "Flower" show, but if I heard that without any prior knowledge of the show, I would think that it was about cut flowers. They do have a cut flower arranging competition, but the show itself is much more geared toward flower gardens.

It is set on an 11-acre lot next to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Part of the grounds are divided up into large and small garden plots, and competitors have ab out 10 days prior to the show to turn their plot into a flower garden. Some have themes, most of the larger ones have water. These are all judged, and winning a gold medal at the Chelsea show is probably the ultimate thing that a gardener could ever get.

Next, there is a great Exhibition Hall. This is a big kind of building set up basically like an enormous County Fair exhibition hall, and various vegetable and flower vendors have booths which range from about the size of a very large booth at a county fair, to a fairly huge section that rivals the gardens outside.

These booths are set up in creative ways to display flowers to their maximum advantage. It's not like a county fair exhibit with a table holding a bunch of cucumbers. It's more like somewhere between a florist's shop and a flower garden. There was a pyramid of stocks, big walls of fuschias, and then what looked like a huge terrarium filled with carnivorous plants. (Note: I NEED A PITCHER PLANT.)

These are also judged, but not as a booth--the Royal Horticultural Society (did I mention that they're the ones that run the show?) go through the exhibit hall and give awards for individual flowers. So, for example, The Telegraph won the gold award for their flower garden, but so-and-so's fuschia won a gold medal. Which means that when you're shopping for flowers for your garden, you can look for breeders whose cultivars have won. Which lots of people do.

The rest of the grounds are basically a gardening trade show. You can join the RHS, of course, or the Delphinium Society. You can buy a rake or many thousands of packets of seeds. You can spend 4500 pounds on a pair of oak garden gates, if you have far more money than me, and possibly far more money than sense as well.

The first day of the show, it is not open to the public--it is the day that the Royal Family visits the show. The awards are handed out on the second day, so I believe that this is the day that the judges also walk around as well.

The next two days of the show are RHS-member only days. The remainder of the week is open to the public, including the last day, which is, as I have mentioned, the sell-off day.

So anyway, now I'm going to post some pictures. Most of them are of the gardens, but I have one or two of various exhibits.