RHS Chelsea Flower Show blog
Chelsea media watch. Bit of a lack of imagination this year I feel.
1. Bunny Guinness Sunday Telegraph ‘sneak preview’: She missed out on designing at Chelsea this year after losing out in a competition. Not mentioned. Instead, reviews of a few gardens.
2. Andy Sturgeon quoted in Sunday Telegraph saying the show will still be great despite lack of show gardens. He chose to design for the Future Gardens show this year rather than Chelsea but is still presenting Chelsea TV coverage.
3. Cleve West in Independent: Fewer big gardens at Chelsea means more opportunities for newcomers. Doesn’t mention his Chelsea sponsor dropped out leaving him without a garden. It would have been more interesting to hear about West’s garden, if it had happened. West is good on designer Tony Smith though-at least he talks to designers.
4. The Times: Uses my story on James May and how there has been some outrage at Chelsea allowing plasticine garden.
5. Telegraph (again): Could the piece with the show gardens runners and riders theme have been inspired by my effort in getting William Hill to do a book on the show gardens best in show favourites, which ran on DT website?
6. The Sun: Uses a photo of Sun garden builders reading the Sun during a break from Sun garden building.
7. Sunday Telegraph mag: Rachel de Thame: “Doing a garden show is not like being in a nice, warm studio.” Also: “I love walnuts” and “often it’s just motorway service station sandwiches”.
8. Sunday Times: Carrie Donald: There are no women show garden designers at the show. Designer Kay Yamada is female. ‘Absence of big guns gives opportunities for newcomers’. RHS press release: absence of top designers gives opportunities for new designers. Independent: Cleve West: pared down Chelsea chance for new faces.
9. Times: Joe Swift: ‘Filming Chelsea is the toughest work of the year.’ Also on BBC: “I’m going to stick my neck out and say Ulf’s garden is going to be best in show.’ Ulf is hot favourite.
10. FT Robin Lane Fox: Since 2007 Chelsea has been sponsored by Marshalls “based in the North of England”.
11. BBC news: ‘The perfume garden by Laurie Chetwood highlights the plants used to make perfume.’
12. The Times Alice Bowe: ‘Chelsea gets criticism but its meant to be aspirational. And it is!’
Chelsea Flower Show blog-15 things you didn’t know.
1. RHS launched a campaign at Chelsea 2008 to favourable press to get VAT dropped from 17.5 per cent to 5 per cent on ornamental plants and seeds. Head of comms Lynn Beddoe says the campaign was ‘parked’ ie dropped before Christmas because of the recession-Gordon Brown needs all the tax he can get.
2. Chelsea QVC designer Adam Frost’s landscaper Richard broke his ankle when he got run over by a forklift truck on the firsat day of the build. Poor Frost hasn’t stopped working since. RHS says no investigation necessary. Health and safety q’s raised though.
3. I’m off to the Chelsea president’s lunch on Monday. Uninvited colleagues would never say anything like: “It would have been boring anyway.”
4. RHS/BBC promoting/using Jo Malone and Andy Sturgeon at the show. But neither are exhibitors. So why use them?
5. The contract for the De Boer great pavilion tent has been extended to 2012, to the surprise of RHS favoured growers such as Rob Hardy, who expected a cheaper option after the 10-year contract ran out in 2010. Locals won’t be pleased as erecting the structure is the very civil engineering feat that caused them to demand the RHS bugger off the site last year. The recession also caused that demand to be ‘parked’.
6. Ian Dexter’s Marshalls garden is favourite for People’s Choice award followed by Eden Project and QVC, depending on how soft people have got in the crunch.
7. Adam Frost says QVC are trying to make him look intelligent by making him pose with Tennyson’s poems. But Association of Professional Landscapers vice chair knows more than you’d think of Tennyson and Keats, who influenced his romantic garden-”one for the girls”.
8. Frost’s romantic hues are a rare change from green at the show. Some thought gaudy colours could be in as antidote to financial gloom. But no-one dared upset the judges, who hate colour.
9. Except Tony Smith at the Quilted Velvet garden. Smith says using 12,000 pink busy lizzies from Burston’s came to him in a flash. Then he realised the judges would hate it. Then he decided he didn’t care.
10. Big story running up to the show was James May’s plasticine garden. No plants. No designers would criticise this but Seabrook and Bradley did. This appeared in The Times and Scotsman.
11. Just one woman show garden designer this year-Kay Yamada. Last year there was Denise Preston, Yvonne Innes, Arabella Lennox-Boyd, Sarah Price, Clare Agnew and Penny Denoon. Society Garden Designers should have something to say about this.
12. Talking of James May. BBC press office said he was doing no interviews last Friday. Most nationals did speak to him, as did I. What’s the point of the BBC press office? We pay for it. Same as Defra press office. Promote their activities? No. Play silly games with journalists? Yes.
13. Several papers have called me looking for stories. They want a celeb-eg Titchmarsh, to say this will be the last ever Chelsea. All of them. It won’t be and they won’t say it, I told them. Did a lovely positive piece in the Standard last week on how CFS adapting to recession.
14. Cliche of the show: “It will be interesting to see what happens next year.”
15. The book grow your own fruit by Chelsea presenter Carol Klein will not be promoted by the RHS or BBC. Beeb says it doesn’t promote presenters books. But it did with Klein’s GYO veg, which sold 300,000 copies. Chelsea bizarrely, is now produced in Birmingham. The only person with enough gardening outside broadcast experience to do Chelsea’s 11 hours of coverage was former GW producer Rosemary Edwards. So she had to move shows. But Chelsea production staff had to move to London.
