Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

Bloomin' trenches!

The 2014 Hampton Court flower show was, as always, fantastic.  The stand out garden had to be the WWI shell-crater garden, complete with actors explaining what life was like in the trenches (shite!).

A man appreciating art.

It’s crowded this year.  It takes more than low cloud the colour of lead and the sort of humidity normally associated with latitudes and morals that make it socially acceptable to drink gin at/for lunch to put off the RHS faithful, but the promise of good(ish) weather has brought out, well, the fair-weather show-goers too.

Accordingly, you need to be mindful of personal space.  This is not just because every second person appears to be dragging a small plastic trolley behind them, like the horticultural equivalent of the wee wifie out for her Saturday messages with her tartan shopper, but also because many people have plants in bags.  The bags themselves contain just an average plant pot with soil, but the plants can extend up to three foot and more, and swing along beside their owner like fragile metronomes. 

(The etiquette on accidentally beheading what was, five minutes ago, a prized purchase is to act casual, use the damaged flower as a buttonhole and deny all responsibility, explaining that you were by the Pimms tent when this tragedy must have happened.  For this reason you must always be drinking Pimms).

Pimms makes the crowds tolerable, that’s why it’s the perfect summer drink, it also makes spectating at summer sporting events bearable.  If your team loses at cricket, it takes five days for this to happen.  That’s a long time to travel from a state of anxiety to disappointment.  Pimms is the HS2 of mood enhancers, it takes you straight from anxiety to relaxed without all that faffing around at weepy, depressed and angry.

Also part of the crowd this year, mobility scooters, chariots of dire. 

Now, I am all for people who would not normally be able to enjoy events being able to enjoy them to their fullest, but isn’t that what telly is for?  I’ve never been to the British Grand Prix, but I’ve watched it on telly and, unlike anyone who actually went along, I was home opening a beer just as soon as the winner crossed that finish line. 

More needs to be done on integrating these things into crowds I think, as a muted peeping noise is just not enough warning that some sod driving what appears to be a small car is barrelling up behind you with a sense of entitlement and a small child on their lap.  Maybe they could double as plant porters next year.

Scarecrow?  Or cunning device used to fool German prison guards?  For months at morning parade they thought this was 4287623 Private 'Pinky' Brown.

The plant porters were much in evidence this year, youths with wheelbarrows ferrying around purchases for folk.  But really, plant porters, must you all snooze in your wheelbarrows when not working?  Just because it forms a stock shot on the BBC show coverage each year doesn’t mean you have to recreate the scene.  This is an RHS show, not Titchmarsh cos-play.  It’s like some twisted Anne Geddes tableaux.  Worse, a gangling teen asleep in a barrow just looks like another Friday night when the agricultural college students have drunk themselves insensible.

As well as the more ordinary examples of show-goer, there are some rare blooms, that special breed that leave their garden only a few times a year, this being one of them, and are identifiable by having dirt under their fingernails so old it will form the basis of a ‘Time Team’ special later in the year, and by having at least one garment fastened using something normally used in the garden, such as twine, or a dibber.

Over at the growing tastes marquee, one thought occurred – I fucking hate the recession.  Back when Tony Blair or Gordon Brown was PM, you could come here and be insensible of free samples of gin within the hour.  Now, the cheese samples resemble the crumbs left over when one has had one last go at the cheese-board on Christmas Day.  One bloke was even handing out samples of cheese with tweezers.

Also, parents, just because young children get into the show for free does not mean that you are required to bring them.

Hampton Court

The Hampton Court Flower Show is billed as the biggest flower show in Britain. Which probably means the biggest anywhere, because nobody is as keen on gardening as the English, with the possible exception of subsistence farmers out in the arse-end of some hard-to-pronounce country whose continued survival depends on a good rice crop. It's also visited by the biggest collection of gardeners in England, from those that tend an estate to those that tend a pot plant with a name in the one sunny corner of their flat.

A perfect bowl of fruit, luscious, ripe and gorgeous, at the Waitrose display. This is possibly the most middle-class image ever recorded. Warning - they get really funny if you pick any of these and, like repressive regimes who hunt down those who favour democracy, they can find you in a crowd because of your stained fingers.

The English love to garden. This is for a number of reasons.

First and foremost it is because a large garden means that your nearest neighbour is a respectable distance away, hopefully separated from your home with a high hedge or two, and a moat. Your moat. The one with the genetically modified crocosharks lolling in it.

The secret of success is to have unconventional, strange looking plants in very regular lines, like modern art, nobody feels equipped to criticise something that looks that odd. Do not turn to the lady next to you and ask if she likes things ten inches long with a purple tip. If you do, don't wink while doing it.

Even a small garden can provide privacy, if your hedge is high enough or your feature wall is topped with razor wire.

And the English love to grow things. Beautiful flowers and bountiful fruit. If the beautiful flowers can be entered into a local competition to win you glory, that's good. If your bountiful fruit can be grown a couple of inches longer than the others in a 'largest marrow' competition, bringing defeat to your bitter rival, better still. If anything you grow can be converted into alcohol, better yet. And if you grow something that looks phallic enough to cause the Vicar to flee should you place it before him should he call fund raising, or give the organist a funny turn when you plonk it on the altar at harvest festival, that's perfection.

Intimating to the grower that his plants look artificial will see you chased the length of the floral marquee with an enraged yokel three short steps behind you.

The English grow gardens of flowers because they like flowers. They grow gardens of vegetables because they taste great but even more importantly, they remind us of the war when we were digging for victory. Look carefully at any decent vegetable plot and you will see a little Anderson shelter in the corner.

It's all about trade at the end of the day. Yet grabbing a handful of the nearby display and asking 'how much' is very much not approved of.

While the English love to garden in seclusion (the garden is a place for solitude, be it quiet reflection, furtive smoking or, that perennial favourite, the midnight interment of a hastily murdered unwanted house guest) yet oddly relish the crowds at a flower show.

It's as if some critical mass or tipping point is reached of people who spend much of their lives with potting compost under their nails and they start enjoying each other's company. Of course, the principal reason for this is that there is a sufficient divergence of interests that every need is catered for. If the show were, say, a festival of parsnips, then the natural aggression of the parsnip grower would mean that things would turn as ugly as a phallic root vegetable pretty soon, resulting in the usual mayhem and a display for only for soup.

An olive tree, what could be lovelier? Well, an olive tree with lavender beneath. If Greece adopted this planting method, they could export sachets of scent to keep underwear draws fresh as well as providing the worlds favourite cooking lubricant, hence doubling their economic prosperity. And they'd still be f**ked!

But at Hampton Court the lovers of the succulents and those who favour box can pretend a polite interest in the passion of the other, secure in the knowledge that their way is the true path to happiness, and that path is lined with the bedding plants of their choice.

In a simpler age, when farms were farms owned by families rather than agro-industried owned by the banks, this is what tractors looked like. Built to a human scale rather than the grotesque balloon-tyred tractors on steroids with enclosed air-conditioned cabs, GPS and hot tubs that farmers have today, it's true that the driver would occasionally die of exposure, but at least you could bloody pass him on a B road, rather than trailing behind for miles with only the occasional splod of manure flung from the tractor tyre to your windscreen to relieve the monotony.

The show is a meritocracy. The show gardens, large and small as well as the displays of flowers and vegetables in the floral marquee are there to be judged and ranked. The judging panel choose carefully which garden deserves gold, silver gilt, silver or bronze medals, balancing a desire to fairly reward beauty and hard work with, it would appear, a genuine desire to pitch visitors into a state of incredulity as they wonder why the hell a rustic cottage in a pastoral garden got a silver while what appears to be a lawn with a rotary clothes line festooned with fairy lights got a gold.

Garden sculpture. Presumably for people who find this sort of thing amusing. If, in front of the leapfrogging frog (Oh, I just got it!) there was a small boy holding a blender to catch it, that would be funny.

Either this is a fantastic bit of planting, or they just let a plot go to seed last year.

This year, the garden as social space was very much the theme. The English love eating outdoors, it's almost perverse that a race dwelling on an island with a climate so ill suited to it could develop such an affection for dining al fresco, yet the English have turned picnicking from an art into a science.

This shade of blue is only achievable by dedicated growing. By master gardeners. Who did LOADS of acid.

The advances in windbreak technology alone are staggering and the same principles developed by the English to keep tea warm long enough to finish when sipping the stuff on a rain-scoured seafront will probably be incorporated into the space suits for any future Mars mission.

The ultimate fate of anything found in any English garden, up to and including badgers, is to be adapted for alcohol. the perss is useful because after you have pressed the apples you can use it to print the labels. And kill Terminators.

So it was natural to see many gardens planned around tables and chairs and social dining in the garden. It was also good to see some honesty, with one of the small garden featuring a huge flat screen telly on the wall and a seating area facing it. The idea was that this was the domestic version of open air cinema.

These ugly bulbs will one day turn out to be beautiful lilies. There's probably a metaphor here about not judging things in an immature state. But I'm just wondering what would happen if you fermented these bad boys and turned them into an alcoholic beverage. Given tat lillies stink like a combination of dead flesh and urine (No? Just me then) I would dub any such concoction 'Loopy Juice'.

Next year, I hope to see this taken to the next logical step; the telly showing premiership soccer and a solar powered fridge full of beer placed nearby. If the garden is well screened with high hedges, then after dark it can become the Babestation garden - not so much for the al fresco perving but because if the models that channel features are rough enough to stop my principle nocturnal activity dead in its tracks, then it can do the same for the crap-happy fox and cat population.

Honest. Unpretentious. The greatest threat to the French since Wellington, Nelson or the clap. A vine that grows on English soil and produces great grapes. The English already brew the greatest beers in the world and distill the greatest spirits (scotch and gin). It was only a matter of time before they tried wine and when they do, they'll conquer the world. Again.

12 days of Christmas – walking off the turkey

Off to Hampton Court for ice-skating. Not actually ice-skating you understand, the Thames last froze over 100 years ago and anyone attempting to skate on it had better be towed along by a speed-boat. No, ice-skating on the seasonal man-made outdoor rink. Well, not actually ice skating on that either - to do that you need to book your tickets in July, 2005, but rather to look at the ice rink installed at Hampton Court and place your bets on which skater will fall over first.

As the day was very mild, falling had a double jeopardy, as there was a half-inch of water on top of the ice. This made for impressive plumes of spray as people shot about the place, but did make everyone a little cautious.

Walking alongside the Thames, pausing only to shout at the puppy not to chase joggers (one of whom was, I have to say, a little bad tempered – well so would I be if I was jogging while the rest of the world was simply strolling or just reaching for the extra-comfy sweat-pants instead) was a good way to work up an appetite for a pic-nic consisting of whatever Christmas dinner had not yet been consumed, forced into a bap.

Why do Christmas dinners always result in so many leftovers? I suspect it’s because people buy stuff to eat at Christmas that they don’t usually eat and don’t even like. Sprouts are the prime example. This year we didn’t have any and they weren’t missed. Having said that, I do now have the oddest craving for one. Maybe the human body needs just three sprouts every year, no more, no less.

What this doesn’t apply to is Christmas Pud. I’ve been road-testing them since November to pick just the right one to serve up to the family (orange panettone).

The swans and ducks on the Thames don’t get sick of an unvaried diet – as we finished our pic-nic, a swan sidled – there’s no other word for it – up in the expectation of a bit of bread. We tossed a bit to the river, it fell short, I stooped to retrieve and relaunch and then the bloody beast launched itself from water to bank in a single slingshot motion, complete with angry hiss.

The angry hiss was almost drowned out by the startled scream that issued from me. The last place I wanted to be at Christmas was in A&E explaining to the nurse that my injury was caused by brutal pecking, explaining to the royal parks constabulary that I didn’t mean to kill the sodding thing but that it bit me and so I strangled it in reflex (easy, so much neck to choose from) and explaining to the chap from the local paper that no, I did not think ‘seasonal swan slayer’ would be a good headline.

RHS Hampton Court 2007 - the cocktail!

There’s no doubt that all the gardens, show and otherwise, at the RHS show at Hampton Court were immaculate. Some were spectacular, some beautiful, some more than others. And some had bars!

"Waiters start to worry what will happen when the booze runs out."

There’s a lot you can do with a smallish plot, and one of the common themes this year appeared to be sticking a bar in the corner of it and giving away booze in the hope of a) securing the ‘people’s choice’ prize through outright bribery or b) getting one of the increasingly schloshed crowd to sign up to buying a crate of whatever it was you were giving away in thimble-full glasses.

From a drinking point of view – the day went well, starting at the Gran-marnier garden with the established tactic of ‘one for me, one for my friend’, then on through sherry, onto Australian reds, whites and sparkling before a soft landing at the excellent Torres garden and some robust Spanish red.

"Olives are delicious...obviously somebody must come up with some way of making alcohol from them!"

Remarking to a couple of welly-sporting women in front of me at the booze queue at one of the gardens ‘I believe there are plants here too’, they fixed me with a look and replied ‘really? We only come for the clothes.’. Obviously they are refugees from the Country Living tent.

There was a lot that was remarkable about this year’s show. I loved the many ‘drought resistant’ gardens, especially those being pumped out given the constant rain in the last months. I loved the ‘conservative values’ garden, the Oak, the bedding plants shaped like a British fields, the tree that doubles as a lynching post for asylum seekers and the secueters that can be used to castrate crims – but best of all the thick hedges for upper class tories to have sex with call-girls behind.

"Ah, a grove of metal trees...what was in that last gin?"

The day ended very well at the Country Living tent with the purchase of sausages and organic Gin. Not only was this gin good for me, it was good for the environment and the economy of the organic world, I was helping pandas and polar bears by buying gin….or something. One thing is for sure, the guy on the stall made the greatest small gin and tonics – the sample glasses are lilliputan and are normally filled with neat gin (they are the size of a shot glass). I insisted he make me a gin and tonic and I could see that he was glad that he’s had the request, as he profusely apologised for having no lime. I cursed him for a barbarian and drank my gin.

When one tired of helping penguins, one could redress the balance and visit the British Airways stall. Here were two club class seats and, judging by the number of people having their photograph taken in them, reclining with their bottles of gin (or was that just me?), I think BA profits are set to rise, even if, because of security scares, their aeroplanes do not.


"This year's Gold Medal for fricking creepy stall...stone children! Aggghhhhhh, Aggghhhh! Stone children! Children that have been petrified by the witch at the end of the village! No? Just me? Well, the stall owner looked like some sort of ciramic peado!"