Week 21

Chelsea Flower Show beauties

Hello!

I hope you’ve had a beautiful week.

This is our weekly post in which we track the year, week by week, in its minutiae. I tell you something that I have done/seen/eaten this week that feels particular to this week in the year and then you tell me yours in the comments. At the end of the month I combine them all into a beautiful big poem of sorts, which we love very much.

Here’s mine:

Chelsea Flower Show

I have been going to Chelsea Flower Show press day for work purposes for a very long time. It started when I was a baby horticultural journalist working on the RHS’s The Garden magazine, and I have been most years since then in various capacities. I think that, in the way of these things, there was a period when I got a bit jaded by it, a bit ‘yada yada…’. And then lockdown happened and I sat in my house and thought ‘What on earth was I thinking?’ Beauty and colour, glasses of champagne, horticultural excellence, lively sunny London streets, lovely old colleagues and friends, the pub afterwards, all of that felt like a delicious, impossible dream, like something I had imagined.

Suffice to say I now grab it with both hands. It is a real marker in the year - there is no doubting that summer has begun. I had a gorgeous, fun time and saw lots of beautiful things. Here are a few of them.

This scene on the National Garden Scheme garden could almost be from one of my recent walks in the woods, if it weren’t for the little crowd of onlookers and the fact that Alan Titchmarsh was within shouting distance. There was SO much woodland at this year’s Chelsea, and I am of course all for that.

I was incredibly moved by the Terrence Higgins garden, Bridge to 2030. This monolith, planted around with beautiful flowers and trickling water, was designed to echo the terrifying ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ tombstone that featured in the 1980s media campaign to alert people to the dangers of HIV and AIDS. It represents the vast leaps in HIV treatment since that time, where now most people who contract it will live entirely healthy lives. The title refers to the vision and goal of there being no new HIV cases in the UK by 2030, an aim that is genuinely achievable. A beautiful garden with an incredible message.

This is Ann-Marie Powell’s garden and I always love her colours. This was no exception. Just so lush.

And I just thought this was very cute.

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That’s it from me! What have you done/watched on telly/baked/picked/sniffed this week that felt particularly ‘this week in the year’?

Leave me a comment below.