Chelsea

Yesterday Martin and I went to the Chelsea flower show. I have always wanted to go but never been able to as I was always working, so it was a real treat when Wayne offered us 2 free tickets and the date of them con-insided with Martin's day off.

We travelled up by train and then (after much searching for the ATM machine at Victoria station) caught the shuttle bus service. There were so many people taking this that the bus company had had to bring in some of the open top tourist busses for duty. So for a few quid each we got to ride on the top of one of these when tourists on the tour were getting the same for £30! The garden show is amazing. So many people but so well organised. Lovely wide roads so that you dont feel squashed at all, and plentty of facilities (although the ladies toilet queue was round the block!)

Drink and food was expensive, but only to be exected in the middle of the trendy part of London, although I was disappointed not to get a glass of Pimms but at £4.50 a small glass - well no way hossie!

We had met a bloke on the station platform who had told us he was going to be manning the Marshalls children's garden so that's where we headed off to first. The trouble with the show garden's is that they are very design orientated, so there wasnt one overall that we loved although every one had aspects we liked. The children's garden had been designed by children apparently but of a whole I do not think many children would have played in it for that long.

From seeing all the show gardens we concluded that - colour is not 'in' this year. All the themes were either green, or purple and white. Shrubs were popular, as were vegetables. Practically every garden included veg somewhere in them. We then progressed to the small courtyard gardens, all of which we loved. Difficult to pick a favourite because they were all what we thought a garden should be like.

We had carried a small picnic around with us, the picnic area was packed, if only we had chatted up the Marshall's man a bit more and got an invite to the guest tent! LOL We found a little patch of grass by the path though and spent a pleasant time people watching, and observing the BBC film crew. I must have wandered in front of that camera a dozen times but I dont think they caught me once. No idea who these tv personalities are but I snapped them anyway.
Google says this is Joe Swift but I am none the wiser.


The urban gardens were ..odd.. but quite fun and some of them had some really funky water features.
The queue for the floral designs was massive so we went into the Pavillion. Here were the smaller gardens, and the garden centre experts. We fell in love entirelly with the 'Sign of our Times' garden which had a 1950's garden one side and a future garden the other., Most people were looking at the 1950's garden, I think that is what most people's idea of a garden is, and I have to say, it contained all the garden elements that I personally love, including the rotting green house with the worn out guttering collecting water run off into a metal water butt.