Trends come and go in gardening as in fashion or music. The clipped and controlled English show gardens of the 80s gave way in the 90s to the bright and exotic, which have now fallen away to allow the blowsy nostalgia for country meadows and dells.
The planting in several of the show gardens invoke hidden glades, overgrown pathways and creeks. Classic hedgerow perennials, grasses and self-seeders are woven artfully together to blur the boundaries between designed and simply grown.
Despite Chelsea show gardens being the zenith of the primped and staged; plants are rarely taken from their pots, which are hidden beneath a thin layer of compost (and woe betide a designer whose plastic tubs are spotted by the judges), several this year took the artifice to really delicate and – in the case of Jihae Hwang’s Korean Demilitarised Zone garden – touching levels.
Is it a trend which we can mirror in our own gardens? It’s worth remembering that the early summer blowsyness will quickly give way to a rambling greenery, followed by an often mushy collapse in the wet and cold. Some gardeners don;t mind the honesty of nothing much to look at ‘out of season’. Speaking from my own small garden, I’m not one of them. Instead I’ve coralled the ‘natural’ to the deep patch of dappled shade at its far end: Geranium phaeum, Tellima grandiflora, Tiarella and several types of ferns flop about in a happy ‘naturalistic’ jumble. It’s not true nature… but at least I’ve taken them out of their plastic pots.