I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Chelsea Flower Show looking quite so windswept as the television coverage of yesterday’s press day showed it to be. And certainly the fierce gusts throughout the south east will have made the traditional ‘Chelsea Chop’ – that time in the horticultural year when gardeners are reminded that a swift and judicious dead-heading of certain, robust flowering perennials will bear dividends with a second flush of flowering later in the summer – somewhat more drastic than anticipated in some gardens. In fact in one border here, the force of the wind seems to have inflicted more of a Chelsea Flop on a certain geranium. However, the plant in question being robust to the point of thuggishness, I have no doubt that it will soon make a full recovery. And in the meantime, its temporary absence has opened space into which the lupins can stretch out, and created a gap where we can plant some of the cosmos which we’ve been nurturing from seed in the greenhouse.
It’s an ill wind, as they say, that blows nobody any good.
