Virtual Chelsea Flower Show 2020: what to expect and where to watch tutorials
It takes a lot to cancel the world’s greatest flower show. Since its debut in 1862, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show has only been called off twice – for the first time during the final two years of the First World War, and then for seven years during the Second. This year, the decision wasn’t made until designers and contractors were about to roll on to Main Avenue.
Eight weeks after the Government banned mass social gatherings in an attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus, we still don’t know when they will return.
But for Sue Biggs, director general of the RHS, and the hundreds of nurseries, designers, contractors, plantspeople and gardeners involved in Chelsea, the “sad but inevitable and responsible” conclusion was that none of this year’s flower shows, from April to June, would be going ahead. Smack in the middle of that calendar glinted Chelsea.
Monty Don, who hosts the BBC’s extensive coverage of the show, broke the news to his 400,000 Twitter followers: “heartbreaking for all those who have already worked so hard”. When one replied within minutes, asking if there could be an “online version”, Don was definite: “No.”
Seems that Don was wrong: on May 1 Virtual Chelsea was unveiled – and Don himself appeared on the BBC’s The One Show to tell the nation that photographs of their own gardens could be judged to RHS standards as part of the newly digital flower show.
Up and down the country, designers, press officers and show organisers hurriedly took to Zoom to arrange a simulacrum of horticulture’s annual highlight, one that would be surreally crowd-free, as we beam, instead, into gardens, nurseries and deserted public green spaces to celebrate plants.
Before the imminent future, the recent past. Design duo Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg were at Crocus, picking out the trees for their M&G Main Avenue show garden, when news of the cancellation broke.
“I was like, what are we going to do?” says Bugg. Harris suggested, in lieu of having anything else to do, that they finish setting out the trees for a garden that wouldn’t be planted. “We couldn’t go to the park,” she says, “so we just hung out being a bit miserable. I’m not too proud to say I had a little cry.”
Chelsea engulfs whole seasons in designers’ calendars. “We go full-time from mid-March to the end of May on Chelsea,” says Bugg.
Tom Massey, who was at the point of being “ready to start on site” on the Yeo Valley Organic Garden, also on Main Avenue, was left staring at a void: “There was a case of, ‘What am I going to do with my time now? I’ve got the whole of May booked out.’ ”
He was, however, swift to fill that time. Inspired by a plea on Twitter for plants to spruce up a “really bleak courtyard space” in Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, Massey started to work with hospital head gardeners to get the plants that had been grown to perfection for Chelsea into spaces where they would really make a difference.
Varieties such as Siberian iris, Mediterranean valerian, lesser calamint and false indigo were dispatched to Derriford and, once lockdown measures fell into place, five other hospitals in London, which were nearer the nurseries. We spoke hours after he completed four drops of plants in one day.
“I’m really grateful that I managed to get out and do the drops,” Massey says, “it was quite emotional to see how pleased the staff were to receive these plants. They were a show of support for all the hard work they’re doing.”
Harris and Bugg’s Chelsea gardens have always gone to homes after the show and this year will be no different – only without actually being exhibited first.
“It will still go to a final home in a community land trust,” Harris tells me. Once lockdown has lifted, she’ll go and have a look at the plants that are being held at Crocus while they await their new destination.
For nurseryman and clematis-grower Raymond Evison, 2020 would have been the 60th Chelsea since his maiden visit, aged 16. While work in China earlier this year gave him a good inkling of what was on the horizon for the UK, Evison nevertheless continued as if the show would go ahead: “I carried on growing, it would have been really heartbreaking to throw 2,500 clematis away.”
Virtual Chelsea, then, has validated his efforts. For the first time, thousands of people will get to explore Evison’s Guernsey nurseries from the comfort of their own home. “We’ll do a walk through the 2,500 plants, and the aim is not just to show the plants but really to talk about clematis. I’ll be using the video time to cover some basic details to help educate newcomers.”
For those fortunate enough to be in Guernsey, where sanctions have started to lift, Evison is bringing a bit of Chelsea to the Channel Islands: “I’ll put a display up by our greenhouses, so people can enjoy them,” he says. “Growing the plants has helped me tremendously from a mental perspective.”
Jonathan Moseley, the floral designer and broadcaster, similarly had months of work put on hold when the flower shows started to be cancelled in March – he works at all of them, from RHS Cardiff in mid-April, to RHS Harlow Carr in September, doing arrangements and workshops, or, as Moseley puts it: “floral magic”.
The cancellations, he says, were “so disappointing”, but to compensate he’s been offering insight and inspiration from home. “Each day I’m putting social media posts out of little things I’m doing in my own garden and simple arrangements that I’ve created,” he says, adding that he’ll be offering similar tutorials as part of Virtual Chelsea.
“The message I want to give out for the virtual show is to share flowers with other people, because we haven’t easily got that social contact to meet with friends and family members at the moment.”
As part of the show, Moseley will be encouraging viewers to unite with their neighbours through floristry: “Maybe decorate your gate with flowers, put something near your letterbox so postmen or delivery drivers can enjoy it. Let’s dress up our neighbourhoods and make people smile and engage with it. It just makes everyone feel so much better.”
Harris and Bugg’s pocket park design was firmly rooted in the importance of green public space, something that has become even more politicised during lockdown.
“For Virtual Chelsea, we wanted to do something that reflected that,” Harris says. She is going to cycle to public gardens within reach of her east London home, such as the Olympic Park and Nigel Dunnett’s Beech Gardens at the Barbican, pointing out robust plants that those with urban gardens would do well to consider, but may not have previously known about.
Devon-based Bugg, meanwhile, will go to the Edible Forest Garden where he will, he says, “talk through some of the planting there that had informed our design”.
“We wanted to do something for people who didn’t have their own gardens,” Harris continues. “In towns and cities this time is really pointing out what a luxury and privilege having one is. I hope we come out of this and think more about reprioritising local outdoor space.”
With the uncertainties of Covid still looming, few know what kind of Chelsea Flower Show will take place in 2021, although Massey and Harris and Bugg’s designs remain on ice until next year. What is more intriguing is what legacy Virtual Chelsea may leave behind: the show is not the most accessible, from crowding and getting to its London location and the cost of tickets, let alone the whiff of horticultural elitism it is inevitably accused of.
In many ways, the prospect of opening all of the design, plant and practical brilliance of Chelsea to an online free-for-all is wildly exciting, in that it may lure in people who would never have thought of attending the real event.
“It feels like Virtual Chelsea has only got more relevant,” says Harris, “with lots of people at home trying out gardening for the first time and seeing the physical and mental benefits.”
Evison, who was chairman of the RHS shows committee for the best part of a decade, maintains that Chelsea is “the world leader, of course”, but nevertheless thinks that it “needs to look at itself, and to the future, just to be ahead of the game.” And with dozens of hours of virtual programming, offering unprecedented access through the screen of a smartphone, that is a future few could have predicted for Chelsea.
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What we know: RHS Virtual Chelsea Gardens
Well-known designers and gardeners including gold-medal-winning designer Sarah Eberle, Adam Frost, Anne-Marie Powell and Andy Sturgeon will invite you into their own gardens.
Daily online floristry masterclasses with hosts including Larry Walshe and Nikki Tibbles.
Behind-the-scenes tours from award-winning nurseries.
The School Gardening Club will provide parents and children with fun hands-on activities such as mini-allotments from experts including Lee Connelly and Jonathan Mosely.
See rhs.org.uk for further information.
