Week 21

Chelsea Flower Show; the hawthorn train ride; spotlights in the woodland

Designer Sarah Price’s garden at Chelsea, very possibly the most beautiful Chelsea garden I have ever seen

Hello! Before I begin this week’s three seasonal things: some news. Some of you may remember that I was advertising a midsummer retreat a little while ago. Sadly we haven’t sold enough places to fully pull it off but we have this beautiful space booked that we want to make use of and so we are pivoting to something rather gorgeous, A Midsummer Night’s Feast! With accommodation too if you fancy, but all much cheaper than the original plan as we can fit more people in. I will write a fuller post about this in the next few days but here’s the link if you want to get in quick and book a beautiful, candlelit, seasonal, three-course midsummer feast under the trees for £50 a head.

To business: this is our weekly post where we round up the things that we have noticed that are particular to this moment in the year: eating, gazing at, sniffing, watching on telly, jumping into - we don’t care. We begin with a round up of your previous week’s comments. Here’s your Week 20:

Green, green, green; dancing red poppies on the side of a train platform; fragrant English garden roses in blush pink climbing the ancient walls in an Oxford college, while playing croquet on the lawn with Prosecco; the scent of hawthorn [phewy - Ed.]; irises being fabulous; five-year-old hands picking buttercups on the way home from school and diligently pushing them under chins, just to check; an email from the school about sports day; the smell of freshly mown grass; the park so green with a white trim of frothy cow parsley and may blossom; the gopher snakes out and about, mating and soaking up warmth; celebrations - graduations, Mother’s Day (US) and a birthday pavlova; an outdoor concert; a summer-like thunderstorm; all the rowan trees in flower; first (absolutely delicious) strawberries of the season; almost head high cow parsley and buttercup avenues; starting off some rhubarb gin; making home-made mayo because it’s asparagus season; wisteria unfolding; a waning gibbous moon low in the morning sky; the beginning of dreaded GCSEs; first home-made ice cream of the year; the pollen high and tickly; the grass absolutely covered in daisies; a chalk stream full of flowering watercress.

And we love our occasional notes from the southern hemisphere too, this one from Queensland, Australia: the same sense of joy as you have in the northern hemisphere for being outside as it has just gotten cool enough to be out in the middle of the day, and I’m loving being able to put the blanket out in the dappled sunshine in the back garden and look at the trees/sky/grass with my 5-month old baby boy.

Gorgeous! You are all poets, I swear.

Here’s my Week 21:

Chelsea Flower Show

Burncoose Nurseries’ stand - just perfection everywhere

Chelsea has been a part of my May for a long time, ever since I first started working as a trainee journalist for the RHS magazine The Garden aeons ago, when the whole office would descend en masse for several days and scour the place dawn to dusk for new plants, interesting stories, and the most beautiful angles at which to point our photographers. I have been lucky to be able to go along on press day ever since. Press day people always want critique - what did you think of the standard? which is the best garden, for you? Did you think X carried it off? What trends did you notice? These are the sorts of questions that fly around among those frantically filling inches in papers, magazines and websites on press day, rather than those you see on the telly who wander around with champagne in their hands. I’m afraid I’m always a bit rubbish at this. It all looks beautiful to me. It is highly skilled people doing things they utterly love to the most perfect level they can for the joy of other people, and I find that ridiculously moving, but that doesn’t fill column inches. Don’t ask me, I’m just blissed out and loving everything.

Having said that I was blown away by Sarah Price’s garden, pictured at the top. The skill to take an oddly coloured purple and peach flower and then spin a whole garden, a whole atmosphere and imaginary world out of it, and transport every onlooker into it. Just absolutely exquisite and very possibly my favourite ever.

The hawthorn train ride

The train ride to Chelsea is always at peak hawthorn time, and through peak hawthorn country, and I spend a lot of time gazing out of the window at this white fluffy explosion in the countryside, dotting off into the distance. I will not tell you quite how many hundreds of pictures I took out of the window of bits of railway sidings and blurry bushes to get this pic, but I would have you understand that it demonstrated a true devotion to this substack.

Spotlights in the woodland

There is a strange quality to the light in the woods now, with little slits of light falling through and lighting up individual plants. Spotlights. It is caused of course by the canopy filling in above, and these being the only gaps left, and soon those gaps will be gone and my beloved woods will be gloomy and I’m not sure how I feel about that. But for now it’s magical.

That’s it from me, over to you. Tell us what about this week has been particularly ‘this week’.