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There are only 10 days to go until the official start of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. Not that you need reminding, right? I’m sure you’ve got the date circled in your diary; tickets purchased; alarms set; recordings scheduled, to make sure you catch every single minute of the BBC’s week-long, wall-to-wall coverage.
OK, maybe not. But there is no escaping the fact that the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is a big deal. More than that, it is an institution. A global superbrand. A floral behemoth that represents many things to many people.
For the great and good of the garden design world, Chelsea is a place to showcase their latest ideas, bag themselves a gold medal in the process and thus secure their elite status (and fees). For up-and-coming designers, it represents an opportunity to skyrocket their careers to the next level. For nursery owners, it is a chance to show off – and sell, sell, sell – their newest cultivars. And for us punters, it is a place to find inspiration, and of course to purchase a minibus-load of plants.
Like Ascot, say, or Wimbledon, the Chelsea Flower Show represents a very particular sort of Britishness, all pomp and circumstance and Rule Britannia; Earl Grey tea and exceedingly good cakes; and the occasional royal, dressed in their summeriest informal finery, nodding appreciatively at a delphinium.
But while Britain is anyone’s match when it comes to this unwavering respect for tradition, it is also the home of punk.1 Eccentricity, creativity, a healthy distaste for authority – these are eminently British qualities too. And if that sounds more your flavour, then perhaps this year you might want to swerve the Chelsea showground, and find your kicks on the fringe.
Later this month, the Chelsea Fringe will celebrate its 11th annual edition. Not-for-profit, volunteer-run, and entirely unaffiliated with the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the Fringe is not so much a location as it is a calendar of events. Most of these, as you might expect, take place in London, but they are also scattered much further afield: Bristol, Naples and Seattle all have a packed schedule as part of this year’s Chelsea Fringe.
The Fringe was founded in 2011 by Tim Richardson, whose own career has been appropriately eclectic. Having initially performed in comedy acts alongside the likes of Stewart Lee and Armando Ianucci, Tim soon turned his back on acting and found himself in the world of journalism. He has, at various times – take a breath – written biographical entries for the RHS’ Dictionary of Horticulture; been the Gardens Editor at Country Life magazine; launched the upstart gardening magazine New Eden; been headhunted to work with legendary mag-man Tyler Brûlé on Wallpaper; been an art critic; a theatre critic; a gardens columnist (many times over); an author; and a university professor, teaching Landscape Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and writing the Landscape History diploma course for Oxford University.
Oh, and he’s also found the time to create and then sustain the most off-beat and off-the-wall festival in the world of horticulture.
I caught up with Tim a couple of weeks ago on a chilly morning in Finsbury Park, North London. Charmingly geeky, keenly intelligent and totally unguarded, Tim told me all about his run-ins with the RHS, his run-ins with high-powered Chelsea show-garden sponsors, his run-ins with the Society of Garden Designers… You get the gist. We also discussed gardening as an art form, people power, and the manifold wonders of the Fringe.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How and when did the idea for the Fringe come about?
I woke up very early one morning during Chelsea Flower Show week with this fully-formed idea about this fringe festival, based on the Edinburgh Festival. I’d been a theatre critic for 23 years and I’d gone to the Edinburgh Fringe every year – I’d performed there – so I thought, well why don't we have a fringe to the flower show?
As a journalist, I’d been writing about things like Bankside Open Spaces Trust and the guerrilla gardener, Richard Reynolds. I was inspired by what they were doing – small-scale interventions in the urban realm, not top-down, environmento-globo-eco stuff. I was very enthused by it and wanted to be a part of it, but I thought the best way I could do that was to lean on my experience, as a polemicist.
You’ve obviously been to the Chelsea Flower Show over the years, as well.
Yeah, I’m kind of The Telegraph’s person who writes about Chelsea Flower Show – I’ve done that for about 15 years. I do these odds on who’s going to win every year, and I always get it right. Five years in a row I predicted who was going to win Best in Show. The bookmakers, William Hill and everyone, have stopped taking bets on it!
What do you think the Chelsea Flower Show represents? What is it for?
I like the Chelsea Flower Show and I don't want it to end. What it’s good at is cutting edge planting design, and high level horticulture. And it's also good at the wonderful nursery stalls in the marquee, which are like a Victorian cottage industry – you know, delphinium specialists, sweet pea specialists – and they're shown in a particular way, which is the way they've always been shown, which is a wonderful tradition, I think.
It's just a real showcase of high level horticulture. It's its own thing. I mean, there are lots of things I'd like to change about it. It's very, very corporatised. And the rules on the show gardens are far too draconian and prescriptive.
How so?
They're too expensive, basically. They cost a lot of money to make, these show gardens. And I know, because I was involved in one. When I worked on Country Life magazine, I organised a show garden, in 1997. I didn't design it, but I know what the process entails.
These companies, and charities, are spending anywhere between £50,000 and £250,000 budget on this. And that's not even including all the stuff that's loaned to them, given to them, not in the budget. From a marketing perspective, you have almost wall-to-wall coverage on the BBC that week – and highly uncritical coverage as well, which is something I, as a critic, have a bug bear with. It is so uncritical, I can’t even watch it. But anyway, I just don't think charities should be spending so much money.
And there’s obviously question marks around sustainability, as well: the huge amounts of resources that go into creating a garden from scratch, which is then going to be removed a week later.
That’s particularly the case with things like stone, and the buildings. There's this phenomenon at Chelsea Flower Show, what you might call “the shack at the back,” which are these often really swanky buildings. And often in recent years, they've been trumpeting environmental design standards, but as you say, it's a completely unsustainable situation. And all of these gardens, which they claim are getting moved onto new places and getting put in housing estates, are just not.
I had an incredible run-in with Morgan Stanley a few years ago because I was critical in print of their community garden, which Chris Beardshaw designed. It was supposed to go to the community who live near Canary Wharf, where Morgan Stanley have their HQ. And I rang up the community, the people who were going to get it, and they were very polite about it, but basically Chris Beardshaw had designed this, like, mini Sissinghurst, with these sculptures and things. They didn’t want that – they wanted to grow vegetables. They wanted to grow vegetables.
So what happened?
The PRs rang me and told me, “one of the [Morgan Stanley] directors wants to see you.” I was summoned to the garden, and had a big row with him, and Chris Beardshaw, about it. And I just said to them, “you’re complete hypocrites. You've got all this money as a bank and yet you're funding this one garden for your own marketing advantage, and with that money you could have made a dozen gardens.”
It’s so interesting that you received that response from them. I feel like in other spheres – art or film or architecture – people might be more used to criticism, and have a thicker skin about it. But like you said, the whole conversation and coverage around gardens is traditionally purely positive.
Yes, true. It’s like daytime TV or weather forecasting. Gardeners’ Question Time is a lot better now, but it used to be a bit like somebody talking to you in the day room of a care home. You know, that kind of, “how are we today? Hasn’t the weather been nice?” The care home people don’t deserve to be talked to like that, and gardens people don’t deserve it either.
What about with the RHS itself: has there ever been any tension there? What’s your relationship like with them?
I think they were very suspicious of the Fringe, initially. They were commercially very nervous, that it was going to be some rival Chelsea Flower Show, with a show ground. I explained that it wasn’t, but there were still some people in the commercial bit who seemed to have convinced themselves that this was some sort of entrepreneurial thing that was going to steal all their sponsorships. So they were actually not very positive. But after that initial scepticism, they settled down and accepted us. And they’ve since actually been quite supportive, and occasionally mentioned us in their press briefings. But I think the best way of describing it is that they sort of tolerate us.
And you remain completely unaffiliated with the Chelsea Flower Show?
We've always just done our own thing. We use the name, and time – the Chelsea week – but we don’t really do stuff that is specifically about Chelsea Flower Show. We don’t attack Chelsea Flower Show or try to satirise it. I thought we would, initially, but the interest in that went away very quickly. Because the reality was, the sorts of events in the Fringe were much more interesting and inspiring than some silly satire.
Is there an ideal world in which the Flower Show modernises in such a way that all the things that currently happen as part of the Fringe become integrated into the actual show? Or do you think there’s always a need for a Fringe?
I think there’s always a need for a Fringe, don’t you? I think there should be a fringe to the Fringe – why have they let this great, august institution, the Chelsea Fringe, go on for 11 years? Where is the fringe to us? The RHS were quite keen to sort of own us, at one point, and I had to make it very clear that the Fringe doesn’t exist unless it’s independent. In all worlds of culture and art we should have all sorts of different exhibitions and shows and events, across the whole gamut. Ones where you have to wear a fancy hat… and ones where you don’t!
Hats aside, something else that’s very different about the Fringe is that you don’t hand out medals. It has always struck me as strange that people can’t just display nice gardens or plants – it has to be competitive.
Yeah, there are no awards, no judges. I think there’s a different generation of gardeners coming through – partly age-defined, but not totally – that have a different attitude. People are getting into gardening not for the reasons people might have done previously, because of wanting to be a competitive grower, or even due to a love of fine horticulture or garden history, like me. It’s more to do with wanting to grow your own vegetables and fruit, quite often, and getting out of the supermarket tyranny. And also beautifying your area. It’s a very generous approach to gardening. And as you say, it isn’t competitive.
I look upon it as a mild form of environmental activism. I really believe in the power of the “little platoons”, as Disraeli called them. Small groups of people having an impact on local areas, and thereby having a bigger impact on the cultural attitude. And I think that's actually been a bit lost in all of the top level, governmental stuff. I mean obviously that’s all necessary, but it kind of alienates people. They feel like they are then powerless, and can have no agency.
For sure, it’s important for people to have access to gardening and growing, in any way they can.
Something like gardening is our most profound interaction with the planet, and it's a physical interaction because your hands are in the soil and you're touching the earth and the plants, and then you're eating them and absorbing them sometimes, as well. I mean, it's a pretty obvious thing to state, but I think it is quite a profound feeling that many of us get when we’re dealing with our gardens.
Gardens are really important, but they've been derided in our culture as a “hobby”, as “jobs for the weekend”, as “an outdoor form of DIY”. Gardening is seen as an amateur thing, and it's just not very high up in the hierarchy of the arts.
There does seem to be a changing perception of gardening, away from hobbyism towards something more radical. A kind of grassroots movement.
Definitely. And the RHS has caught up with this as well and has been doing some quite good work fostering community gardens. That kind of attitude to gardening is much more in the mainstream now, definitely.
I think crucially, it’s no longer an embarrassing, weird hobby. In my own experience, I was a comedian and actor, and then I met people at parties and they said, “what are you doing?” And I said, “I'm writing for the Royal Horticultural Society, about gardens!” And they looked at me like I’d had a breakdown or something.
At what point did you segue into horticulture?
Well, I was always interested in gardens. I'd already visited lots of 18th century gardens as a student, and even at school. I taught myself History of Art A-level, because it wasn't taught at my school, and I did a project on the street furniture of Reading, where I lived. I was really interested in benches and bins and things – bread-and-butter landscape architecture stuff, though I didn’t know what landscape architecture was back then. So I was interested in what you might call the outdoor realm, I suppose, as a sort of weird 17-year-old, semi-incensed about the quality of the local parks.
Where did that interest in the outdoor realm come from?
I think it was because my granddad and my great uncles were all gardeners, professional gardeners on estates, as young men – though they became other things later. So I'd go around gardens with them as a child, and they would be very appraising of all the gardens. I’d be pushing my grandad around in his wheelchair, and he would be so sniffy about the horticulture standards of places.
And we used to discuss the quality of the vegetables we were eating, at Sunday lunch and stuff, in great detail. It’s the sort of thing that only Italians are supposed to do, but we were doing it in Slough.
Was there an epiphany moment when you realised that you no longer wanted to be a comic actor?
I was actually auditioning to be a pirate in Birmingham Rep’s Peter Pan, in Covent Garden, and I had this moment of clarity. I thought to myself: “I don’t want to be a pirate. What am I doing here?”
A moment of clarity shared by many pirates, I’m sure…
Yes, but I wasn’t even a pirate, I was a proto-pirate. And I thought of my friends who are actors, and I thought, they really want to be this pirate. I know that. And I know I don’t. So I gave that up. But for years, for decades really, I’ve had people slightly disappointed with me that I didn't go on and be a proper famous performer.
What’s your relationship like with your own garden?
Well, it's changed over the years. I don’t really set myself up as a great gardener, particularly. For years, my normal response to that sort of question is that my own garden is a disgrace, and I say that partly because of this thing about being a critic. There's a feeling in the world of gardens that in order to have an opinion, you have to be a good horticulturist, and I've always maintained that that isn't the case. You know, you don’t expect architecture critics to be able to build a house.
Disclaimer acknowledged. So what’s your garden like?
Our current garden was a vegetable garden for a long time. My wife said one day that she wanted an allotment. My heart sank, because we both work, and we had young children, so I said, “you know what, let’s just turn the back garden into an allotment.” So we did that for a while. Not that well, because it doesn’t get full sun, but we could grow a lot of salad leaves and some fruit.
My front garden I’ve turned into what I’m calling a hedgerow garden. So I’ve taken the ingredients of a classic English hedgerow – wild pears and wild roses and things like that. I recently wrote a book about Sissinghurst, and I was in the middle of that when I was thinking about this garden, which is to say, a kind of dream of the wild. So quite ornamented, with the roses, but then all the roses I’ve got in there are shrub roses which could conceivably be in a field somewhere. So that’s the idea. It’s a bit of an experiment. We’re coming into the second year of it now, so it’s only just establishing itself and I’m putting more things in.
As a critic, you’re not shy about expressing your opinions – has that ever landed you in trouble?
I've been sacked from a number of columns. I had a column for about a decade in Garden Design Journal, which is the Society of Garden Designers’ magazine. I got sacked from that because I attacked the Society of Garden Designers over its own awards. It had launched an awards and it seemed to me that several of the prizes in the first year went to people who had been involved with the awards in some way. I made some satirical comments about it, and I got sacked.
Back to the Fringe. You don’t commission or curate the festival line-up – does that ever make you nervous, either from a number of events or a quality control perspective?
Yeah, really nervous! Every year, we never know how many events we’re going to have. We have no control. We had one year where we had like 270 events. Then this year, at the moment, about 50 projects have registered, but we’re still only just getting going. But we really tell ourselves every year that we’re not judging our success on numbers. That’s a very business-corporate way of doing it – always expanding. We’ve got no interest at all in that. We always tell ourselves: “It’s what the events are.” You have very few duds at the Fringe.
But presumably you advise, or consult in some way?
We give advice. I mean, I have inadvertently in the past given people fully-fledged Fringe ideas. There was one group who wanted to invite people to see the tree pits in their road – you know, the pits around the bottom of street trees – which they’d planted up beautifully. But it wasn't interesting or quirky enough really for the Fringe.
And I was on the phone to the woman organising it and she said, “well what do you mean then?” And I said, “oh I don’t know, do something like, have a gnome invasion.” And in the end that’s what they did. They had all these gnomes, which loads of kids made and painted. It was brilliant. So there have been moments like that, but that was genuinely inadvertent. I didn’t mean to say, “you have to do a gnome invasion.” It was an option – and she went for it!
The 11th annual Chelsea Fringe is taking place from Saturday 21 - Sunday 29 May 2022. To learn more, and find up-to-date info about what’s on near you, visit the Chelsea Fringe website.
Have you ever been to the Chelsea Fringe? If so, what did you see/do? I’m planning to check out a few things myself this year – let me know what has caught your eye, and maybe I’ll see you there!
Please note that I deliberately describe Britain as being the "home" of punk, not the "birthplace". Lots of places like to take credit for birthing punk, from New York, USA to Lima, Peru, but nowhere did it stomp its way into the culture like in the UK.
Very much enjoyed reading this, Dan. A fascinating insight.
Those budgets though....? Try doubling them !