feel better????

lol

ken

Yep - nothing like a full-on rant (although I held back on sweary shouty stuff)

I can totally relate :-))

While nothing on the scale of Chelsea, our own local flower and garden show has very similar attributes. Artificially created gardens grossly overplanted for visual effect with completely inappropriate plants all forced into bloom unnaturally and out of season. As a designer, I have been asked to participate but have studiously avoided all but the most peripheral involvement.

I used to attend annually, as the "plant mart" often featured good stuff you couldn't find all that easily as well great gardening tools and accoutrements. And it was a chance to revisit gardening friends and vendors I seldom got a chance to see at any other time. But after working in the nursery industry for a good number of years, I can get just about any plant I want with my contacts. And there is only so much garden "stuff" one can accumulate in a single garden, so even that is less of a draw. Making contact with seldom seen gardening friends is much more of a loss but doesn't really justify the time and expense involved in attending the show, so last year was my last :-) Unless something quite remarkable happens that compels me to attend.

IMO, the show is more attractive to novice or hobby gardeners as it is all show but little substance and the 'show' part can be quite eye-catching. Especially if you don't understand the reality behind it. And all those plant vendors do a bang-up business selling highly marked up product that one can usually find in season ay any good local garden center at half the price.

Besides, the food court has the most outrageously priced meals imaginable. Most quality restaurants - which this most certainly is NOT - do not price as high. The captive audience!

Here's a slideshow of some 2014 Chelsea Flower Show sights/exhibits.

Here is a link that might be useful: Huffington Post

I haven't been to Chelsea for years. I don't know it's even worth getting het up about since it has about as much to do with gardening as a catwalk show has with what I wear to work. It's just celebrity silliness and as such deserves nothing, not even disdain. It's a pity serious growers feel obliged to attend and show.

'campanula', as a NAmerican gardener I have always longed to attend what I thought was the creme de la creme of garden shows. I guess I can cross that off my "bucket list".

If and when I do come across the pond could you recommend a less flashy but still highly regarded UK garden show?

No.

The concept of garden shows are a bit weird when there are many, many wonderful REAL gardens to be viewed free of charge in all areas of the UK.

But, if you insist, the RHS does a monthly series of shows at the Lindley Halls in London, sometimes related to a single species such as the orchid show or the snowdrop show in January but always worth a look, especially if you really want to see exhibitors (growers) at the top of their game. Failing that, there are the Malvern shows, Tatton show (up in the north) or the Hampton Court show (although that one is catching up on Chelsea in terms of bling and irrelevance.

I viewed the photos in the link provided by duluthinbloom, and fell in love. That horse in Photo 14 is magnificent! The flowers on whole aren't combined or arranged in a way I find attractive. But I generally don't go for commercialized garden shows. However, it isn't that I am against flower show types of spectacles. The Bellagio in Las Vegas puts up an elaborate display in their atrium. They change the design about four times per year and I love to go and view what they have done. That isn't gardening; nor are the booth displays at orchid shows. I tend to put them in the same category as Rose Parade floats. They aren't meant to be gardening; they are a different art form entirely. On par with ranting about apples not tasting or looking like oranges.

(although I held back on sweary shouty stuff)

==>>> yeah.. but it would probably have been more entertaining .. lol

rouge said: If and when I do come across the pond could you recommend a less flashy but still highly regarded UK garden show?

==>>> sure.. i can do that.. give yourself a self guided tour of kew... and perhaps invite campy and flora to meet up with you ...

now that sounds like nirvana ... as compared to the marketing voodoo of crass commercialism.. go to an actual garden ... collection ...

dont you think??? .. and i mean to ask you GBers...

am i right flora.. campy ... i mean about kew.. not lining you guys up for personal tours ...

ken

Here is a link that might be useful: i mean really... look at this freakin glasshouse ... oohh.. that second pic.. is that where they have the lily pads you can nearly walk on ....

Campanula, like Rouge, I've always thought if I were ever there, I'd like to see the Chelsea Garden Show. Thank you for a realistic appraisal of what it is like. That would bother me too. I don't attend the local flower shows either. I remember when I was barely a gardener and went to them once in awhile and was always impressed. I remember how disappointed I was when I understood more about it, that I couldn't use the ideas because as you said, lots of plants put together that can't be grown together, just for starters. I never did realize how much money had been invested to create these displays. That's outrageous and such a waste.

I would much rather visit real gardens. I've always wanted to see Beth Chatto's garden and Highgrove because of the organic basis of it.

In honesty, Gyr.F.does make a fair point in that there are some jaw-dropping displays (although not in the most publicised areas) and the floral halls, where the growers and breeders hang out tend to be at more of a remove from the insanely pumped up artificiality of show gardens. I guess there has always been a weird exclusionary thing going on at Chelsea with the private members days (although obviously open to the famous and media) and the public days.....although the ticket price declares its own exclusionary methods. And I do feel a certain amount of irritation at the hijacking of the skill of gardening in favour of design 'talent' (and, as I have been employed as a garden designer, I know fully how little real expertise is involved in getting healthy plants to look good together, as opposed to a considered selection based on horticultural knowledge and the requirement for many criteria to be met - not least being some sort of longevity and plausibility - and I have already addressed the lack of actual construction competence. In the current context of further education diminishing and horticultural skills disappearing through sheer lack of investment, the myopic obsession with bright shiny surfaces does not do the RHS much credit....although as a generator of revenue and media interest, a cultural event redolent of an antiquated class system and a sort of imaginary englishness (like Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon etc.) it succeeds perfectly.

Absolutely, for a mere fraction of the cost, you can enjoy Kew and also the 4 RHS gardens around the country, at your leisure (where, amusingly, one of the former Chelsea star displays has been relocated and can be seen in all its shoddy pretentiousness and utter cluelessness).

Yep, PM - Beth Chatto's garden is always worth a visit....and with an entry cost which is less than 1/20 of the cost of a Chelsea ticket....and a decent tea shop and nursery as well.

I went to the Chelsea Flower Show about 11 years ago as part of an English garden tour, it was my least favorite stop on the tour. But, as Gyr mentioned, I view it more as art I guess. I do have to say, one of my gardens currently was designed based on one of the display gardens there where I had a corner with a picket fence, so I did bring home some ideas from the show.

Went to Floriade 2012 in The Netherlands and that was pretty much Disney for anyone interested in "flowers". I still had a great time because I do love art and there were some pretty cool things there to "look at", but it wasn't like going to RHS Wisley which was probably my favorite place to really explore.

Like.....what does this have to do with gardening?

{{gwi:222159}}

But still, I had a great time because I just like creativity in general even if it has no real "use" for me in my garden.

Campanula: congratulations, you are gardenweb's Jebidiah Atkinson. And I mean that with the utmost respect.

I suspect the Chelsea Flower Show has always seemed over-the-top to SOMEONE. These days it just has to be even more extreme to compete with everything else that could steal people's attentions. I thought I read years ago there was something like a "Chelsea Fringe" a la the alternative Edinburgh Festival? I think over-the-top spectacles like this are just part of the British national character, at least from my perspective. And someone always finds them revolting. That's fine. If Campanula wasn't disgusted, they wouldn't have done their job. At least they have been since the Great Exhibition, if not before. I quote the wiki:

Six million people "equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time "visited the Great Exhibition. The average daily attendance was 42,831 with a peak attendance of 109,915 on 7 October.[5] The event made a surplus of £186,000 (£17,240,000 as of 2014),[6], which was used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. They were all built in the area to the south of the exhibition, nicknamed Albertopolis, alongside the Imperial Institute. The remaining surplus was used to set up an educational trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research; it continues to do so today.[7]

The Exhibition caused controversy as its opening approached. Some conservatives feared that the mass of visitors might become a revolutionary mob,[8] whilst radicals such as Karl Marx saw the exhibition as an emblem of a capitalist fetishism of commodities. King Ernest Augustus I of Hanover, shortly before his death, wrote to Lord Strangford about it:

The folly and absurdity of the Queen in allowing this trumpery must strike every sensible and well-thinking mind, and I am astonished the ministers themselves do not insist on her at least going to Osborne during the Exhibition, as no human being can possibly answer for what may occur on the occasion. The idea ... must shock every honest and well-meaning Englishman. But it seems everything is conspiring to lower us in the eyes of Europe.[9]

FWIW I don't really like the Philly flower show, even though it's far less ambitious in overall scope than Chelsea. OTOH, for example, I was lucky enough in the 90s to go to an Architecture Association Projects Review Day. (avant-garde school of architecture in London). It was extremely pretentious but I enjoyed it. Likewise, though, some high minded architectural purist might see the event as a crass corruption of what it should be. (the definition of what passes for architecture was absurdly loose. One person's project just seemed to be a room full of male & female models standing around in togas) My point is, if it isn't clear, once you actually have specialized knowledge of a subject, an appeal to a certain interest in that subject may especially not appeal to you.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Wed, May 21, 14 at 6:50