Gardeners’ World Live: the highlights
My report from Birmingham’s NEC, featuring wonderful wheelbarrows, super sustainability, and a TARDIS
Welcome to this special edition of The Earthworm, coming to you (almost) live and direct from BBC Gardeners’ World Live! Part garden centre, part village fête, part sun-soaked service station car park, Gardeners’ World Live has it all.
If you want to watch the likes of Monty Don, Arit Anderson, Alan Titchmarsh, Frances Tophill and the gang giving anecdote-laden talks live on stage, #BBCGWLive has got you covered. If you want inspiration for your garden, be it in the way of new features, landscaping materials or planting combinations, then the rich tapestry of show gardens is for you. And if spending £9.20 on a halloumi wrap that you have to eat whilst listening to a quasi-crooner doing covers of old pop classics is your thing, then you’re definitely in the right place.
If the RHS Chelsea Flower Show represents the elite of the horticultural world, with its posh showgrounds and royal visitors and champagne drenched hospitality tents, then BBC Gardeners’ World live is for the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, the proletariat. People like us.
BBC Gardeners’ World Live is, if nothing else, democratic. And like all great democracies, it is founded on, revolves around, and is fuelled by rampant consumerism. Because as far as I can tell, people come for the gardens, but they stay for the shopping.
What are you in the market for? New mower? Solar-powered fountain? Climate controlled greenhouse? Wooden bench? Lexus SUV? Nemaslug organic pest control? Hot tub? Short-handled shears? New driveway? Life insurance policy? How’s about a Gardeners’ World magazine subscription? A rose arch (roses sold separately)? A hanging love seat? Whatever you want, if it is in any way even remotely, tangentially related to gardening, you can buy it here.
It is possibly unfair to keep making comparisons between GW Live and Chelsea, but the latter is so fresh in the memory that it’s hard not to. For starters, there are no celebrities here – Monty et al notwithstanding. There is nothing elitist or in any way fancy about this place – the outdoor areas of the show are held in what feels like it could be maybe a car park, or a lorry loading area. There is a lovely, laid back atmosphere. There are families. People are picnicking. People are cooing over Canary Island foxgloves (which I have tried and failed to grow previously, and yet here seem to make an appearance in 80% of the show gardens).
As for the show gardens themselves, they are worlds apart from Chelsea. Not worse, by any means, just different. Less showy, more realistic. If Chelsea is avant-garde, this is aspirational. In the spirit of Gardeners’ World itself, these gardens don’t represent high end design, but rather are chock-full of ideas that normal people can replicate in their normal gardens. And best of all, you can actually walk around them; run your fingers through the grasses; sniff the flowers.
Even the most outrageous show garden feature here – a 1.2 metre deep natural swimming pool, costing in the region of £150,000 to install, feels at least like something you might actually want. Some of the sculptures and waterfalls and structures at Chelsea, by contrast, cost just as much to build, but could only ever look at home in a sculpture park, or a Bond villain’s lair.
The show runs until this coming Sunday (19th June), so you can still head down. But for those who can’t make it, here are some of my highlights.
Wheelie Good Garden Design
My favourite part of the entire show was a path-adjacent corner of lawn where 56 matching blue barrows had been lined up in a neat right-angled row, each one overflowing with plants and adorned with adorable handmade ornaments.
Forget your platinum medals and Best in Shows, this is where the real competitive garden design is to be found: the annual School Wheelbarrow Competition.
Inspired by the fact that later this year Birmingham is due to host the Commonwealth Games, this year’s brief for the participating schools – all of which are located here in the Midlands – was to choose a Commonwealth country and create a miniature garden inspired by the flora and heritage and culture of that nation.
Visitors to the show are then given a token each to drop into a barrow-side bucket to indicate their favourite. Whichever bucket accumulates the most tokens by the end of the show will be crowned champion. For what it’s worth, this is my top three.
Bronze: Thornton Primary School, Jamaica
Sometimes, less is more, and Thornton Primary’s colour palette of green and gold is so restrained (and yet so joyous) that it belies the planting designers’ age and experience. Even if you snipped off the bunting, you’d know from a mile off that this barrow represents Jamaica, not just thanks to its colour scheme, but also its planting, which includes callaloo, hibiscus and scotch bonnet peppers.
Silver: Victoria Special School, India
By a Commonwealth country mile, India is the most represented nation in the competition, with 14 of the 56 schools selecting it as inspiration for their displays. And for me, Victoria Special School has captured it best. The painted papier-mâché elephant at the centre of the micro-garden is cute, but the way that the tumbling tangles of nasturtiums on either side of the wheelbarrow echo elephant ears is a stroke of design genius. The plants meanwhile are all ingredients for a curry recipe, making the display pretty and productive in equal measure.
Gold: Delapre Primary School, Wales
Even for a plant lover like me, there’s no denying that often what makes a garden great are the non-botanical bits. It’s true of a Chelsea show garden, and it’s true of a Birmingham wheelbarrow. Here, the magic lies in the framework of the painted wooden dragon’s head and wings, along with the crochet sheep, the crochet dragon, and the crochet daffodil – the National flower of Wales. It is pure charm.
And then there’s the plants, which reflect not just the wild and symbolic flowers of Wales, but also its key agricultural crops. Welsh poppies grow between rows of leeks, foxgloves are underplanted with potatoes, and they’ve even buried some daffodil bulbs in there, despite the fact that they won’t be flowering at this time of year – now that’s what I call attention to detail.
Serious about sustainability
As I hinted at earlier, the show gardens here are cleverly designed and well planted, but very much reflections of how real people garden – or how they should. Ornamentals grow alongside vegetables. Materials are reused and recycled. The plants, by and large, feel familiar.
And the seam of sustainability runs through the whole show. In Frances Tophill’s platinum medal- and Best in Show-winning garden, every single inorganic item, from the brick path to the corrugated steel shed to the greenhouse built from old windows, is either locally sourced, locally made or upcycled from existing materials.
Most of the show gardens include not water features but actual ponds – complete with entry and exit points for small mammals. Everywhere, pollinator-friendly planting is alive with invertebrates. I mean, Garden Organic’s ‘Small Space - Big Ideas’ show garden, which was awarded a gold medal, has an actual compost heap in the corner, full of actual decomposing banana peels and veg peelings.
These are the kinds of details that you take photos of not to upload to Instagram, but to refer to when thinking about your own garden evolution or transformation. Following on from Chelsea, I find that really refreshing.
Happy Bday Beeb
What links Zantedeschia with Dr Who? What connects poppies to Peaky Blinders? How do you get from orchids to Only Fools and Horses? Via the BBC, of course!
Which is why as part of the broadcaster’s centenary celebrations this year, there are bits of Beeb memorabilia littered around the show. It is, quite frankly, a bit naff, but does apparently make for a popular photo opp.
The Peaky Blinders-inspired garden in particular – a kind of woodland hideout complete with half-drunk whiskies abandoned on a table outside a makeshift shack – was an effective and not-even-that-gimmicky garden. Here’s to the next 100 years.
Have you been to BBC Gardeners’ World Live this year? Have you been before? What did you make of it? How much stuff did you buy??! Leave a comment and let me know.
If I can work out how to upload a photo, I'll show you the TARDIS one of my clients built in his garden. All to spec and even with the police notice. My design elements have to start with big blue TARDIS as the focal feature.
I love that barrow competition! And I love that array of sink ponds! After reading and enjoying all your Chelsea coverage, it was fun to vicariously tag along for this event. I'm also still hoping there's a Monty selfie on your phone that you're saving for a future post.