Chelsea Flower Show 2011: Richard Reynolds' highs and lows

By day Richard Reynolds, guerilla gardener, works in advertising. By night (well, most evenings) he fights the filth with flowers and plants sunflowers, apple trees and anything else green in neglected corners of his local south east London and on any motorway slipway he happens to be passing. For more, see www.GuerrillaGardening.org

All three of my previous visits to the Chelsea Flower Show were as a scavenger seeking discarded plants to share in my public guerrilla gardens. Today was different. Although still on the look-out for surplus plants, my purpose was to scavenge highs and lows to share in this paper.

Richard Reynolds' highs and lows in pictures

Diarmuid Gavin’s Irish Sky garden could have been a high point, quite literally. The RHS factsheet cites his as the largest-ever garden at Chelsea and, had it been functioning, it could have been the highest too, providing a vantage point of the grounds even better than Alan Titchmarsh’s crow’s nest sofa. The Irish Sky crane lifts Gavin’s pink-planted pod 25m in the air. But the garden that sounds like an airline was, during my visit, unfortunately afflicted like one - all flights were cancelled owing to high winds.

A more resistant vertical spectacle was Patrick Collins’ 9m high-rise of glass and stainless steel in the B&Q Garden. Unlike the typical blocks sprouting up in gated communities across Britain, his edifice was softened by a brochure-friendly and seductively delicious-looking vertical edible garden. But don’t be fooled by the sales pitch. I know the imaginary residents would pay for this showstopper with an indigestible annual service charge and eventually cutbacks and negligence would trigger its dismantlement.

A better solution for urban food production was the traditional rows of herbs and salads densely packed around the tower. What a great alternative to the typical mixture of spindle bush and berberis that normally fringe a housing development car park. The design was held together by a row six elegant pleached limes, regimented next to the edible tower like the slabs of a neighbouring estate. Collins also provided accommodation for bug life with a perforated high rise of hundreds of comfortable little homes. This segregation for winged creatures is preferable to the policy in my block, where the council dispatches Pest Control officers with pipettes of insecticide to dab around our homes.

A garden pest many of us would pay much to be rid of is the snail. Yet Willie Wildlife Sculptures love them and hoped you would too. For £19,810 you could buy their grotesque giant bronze version. Another large creature crowned Birmingham City Council’s garden. A fierce gorilla looked down, distressed perhaps like me, by the unseasonal display of poinsettia. Note that this was not a guerrilla garden! I hadn’t expected to find any guerrilla gardening at Chelsea, but I was tipped off that some designers had been mischievously planting in each other’s plots. When I interrogated Robert Myers, designer of the Cancer Research UK garden, about the miniature plastic palms poking out from the ferns in the garden opposite his, a broad grin revealed his hand in the matter. It’s nice to know there’s some fun going on behind the scenes of this supposedly serious event.

It was Ann Marie-Powell’s garden Robert had sabotaged. Her design for the British Heart Foundation is an effort to bring her client’s cause to life. But the giant translucent red stepping stones that represent blood vessels and the vein-like “open-weave powder-coated steel sculptural pieces” reminded me of another garden: Dr Graeme Garden and his 1980s light entertainment TV show called Bodymatters, in which the Goodie stumbled around an assault course of giant plastic illuminated body parts. This garden’s red symbolic props were so strident they distracted from Ann’s dense green physic garden around it, which included willows (aspirin), and white foxgloves (digitalin).

The unarguable cause of encouraging children to garden has been a driving force for years now. There were a few gardens made by children this year, including a pair in the pavilion called the Miracle Gro’ers Gardens. I liked them because they were so obviously the work of young children. The plants were not perfect, the display was actually quite ugly and in case we were in any doubt about who was responsible, photographs of the classes and names of the schools were included.

The spontaneity of the children was a welcome contrast to the professional perfection all around. The downer was that their joyful displays were fuelled by the sponsor’s artificial fertilisers. I remember those innocent drug-fuelled days at school too, being passed a bottle of Tomorite at break time by a friendly teacher. As an 11-year-old child, using magic potions from a bottle on my floral corner of the playground was both fun and easier to understand than something more sensible like green manure.

Childhood memories prompted several gardens: the young Tom Hoblyn’s travels around Cornwall inspired his very usable Cornish Memory Garden, although he admitted to me that he’d recently done some fact checking and discovered his memory had invented the Scot’s Pine - but I didn’t mind.

Maggie Hughes described her wholesomely beautiful Postcard From Wales artisan garden as a childhood memory, too. She created a rustic cottage by an estuary with a boathouse surrounded by a delicate and very inviting naturalistic garden with a shaggy lawn. That’s a great Welsh childhood holiday compared with what I remember. When the Reynolds family went to Wales we stayed in Trawsfynydd (home to a nuclear power station), our Austin Maxi died and I fell in a pond - what a show garden that would make!

Nigel Dunnett’s beautiful RBC New Wild Garden is a response to environmental pressures. He told me the garden is designed to be beautiful and friendly to nature and his ambition is to reclaim the word “wild” from those who use it to describe what nature would do were it left to its own devices. He uses “wild” as Victorian gardener William Robinson did, to mean a space that is more casual, changeable and unregimented than the stiff formal gardens of his era.

In contrast, and in case you enjoyed James May’s plasticine garden at Chelsea in 2009, there was another gaudy aberration of intricately hand-crafted nonsense to enjoy this year. too. 'Fantastic Thailand’ sponsored a huge luminous temple surrounded by pink elephants, a construction coated with 100,000 cut flowers. Although the flowers were real they looked fake and were held together by a staggering 1,640 breezeblocks of plastic plant foam.

I found relief nearby in a naturalistic verge. A wooden gravestone caught my eye: “RIP English Elm”. One man stood by, a mourner perhaps? It was Paul King, a man who is bringing about the resurrection of English elms. He showed me test tube seedlings, one of thousands of micro-propagated clones from an elm in Braintree, part of a small cluster in Essex that has been resistant to the disease. His first seedlings are now a decade old and growing in his Chelsea garden.

I decided to scavenge some plants and returned to the recycling depot at the back of the grounds. Back in 2006, the distribution of the surplus and dismantled materials was a shambles. Today the London Community Recycling Network is in charge and the RHS boast of a suspiciously precise figure of 99.6 per cent recycling and 0 per cent landfill. I found 81kg (the boxes were labeled), of delicious watercress in the depot amongst sacks of gravel and bark chippings. I nibbled some but an attendant told me this would be rehomed before the show was over.

However, I didn’t go home empty-handed. Jim Fogarty, designer of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne’s garden, kindly shared a surplus plant with me, a pot of chrome yellow paper daisies, one of a trolley load that he had rejected because, in hindsight, he felt these popular Australian annuals looked too artificial.

You can now enjoy this rejected Chelsea specimen in the more suitably brash environment of the Elephant & Castle, where I have planted it in a guerrilla garden.