Public complain that many gardens are too similar, reports Val Bourne

I have just been enjoying the Chelsea Flower Show and was lucky enough to meet Oxford resident Libby Purves, who gave a highly entertaining talk on her love of the theatre, mentioning her brilliant blog on www.theatrecat.com But I know what you’re thinking: ‘Stop name-dropping, Val, and tell us about the plants!’ Well, it was my 20th consecutive Chelsea and in my early days the enormous canvas tent, which groaned like a hungry animal, was wet and gloomy until midday. It was so popular the RHS devised a one-way system.

You went round cheek to jowl, taking tiny shuffling steps like a gardening geisha, hardly able to stop or turn. A turn round the marquee could take you hours.

Fifteen years ago the old marquee was cut up and made into cushions and bags. A lighter and airier pavilion, divided into two, was put up but somehow the magic went as the scissors snipped through the worn-out fabric. Or did it escape from the newly-created gap by the Monument? The public took it badly and largely abandoned the new pavilion. They began to swarm around the television presenters instead, to the despair of the exhibitors who were left to twiddle their thumbs. Some decided enough was enough.

The old tent became a fond memory. However I did scrape together enough to buy one of the cushions. A year or so ago the RHS asked me to donate mine to the Lindley Library, but only after I’d sat on it for ten years. I miss it greatly. Alan Titchmarsh held my distressed ‘bottom-softener’ up, rather gingerly I thought, on national coverage last year. He announced it was Val Bourne’s cushion. I must have written a thousand articles or more perched on top of it, but it was fame of sorts, at last This year the tide has turned. The Grand Pavilion seemed more popular than the gardens. Billy Carruthers, of Binny Plants, had to go back to his hotel to get more order forms for his peonies. Or was that an excuse?

There were 15 large show gardens and the Laurent Perrier Garden won Best in Show. It was designed by a lovely Italian with amber-brown eyes, Luciano Giubbilei, a man who sounds like a plant himself. The soft planting contained pallid-yellow lupins, ‘Chandelier’ and ‘Cashmere Cream’, and they rubbed shoulders with the Kate Moss of the foxglove world, Digitalis lutea. The creamy Gladiolus tristis, a subtle species gladioli not at all Dame Edna, provided more soft colour and the buttermilk was balanced by blues that included Phlox divaricatus ‘Clouds of Perfume and the dark more-compact Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’.

The white lace flower Orlaya grandiflora provided the froth (all are available from www.crocus.co.uk).

Unfortunately many of the other gardens looked very similar, with the same plants repeated and this must be addressed by the RHS. The public were not enthusiastic and the word ‘samey’ came up again and again. We needed a touch of magic. Luckily one garden broke away and delivered a smoky balance of dark foliage and sultry garden flowers instead. This was the Positively Stoke-on-Trent Garden and my star plant was the amazing pink-red peony with the sultry foliage, ‘Kansas’.

This Gold Medal American peony was bred in 1940 by Myron Bigger in, guess where, Kansas. I’ve always rated it, but it’s always described as a double red, a description probably written by a colour-blind chap. It’s what the Best Beloved describes as ‘tart’s-boudoir’ pink, although I’m not quite sure how he knows. The foliage is almost purple too. Stoke got a Silver-Gilt, a near-miss Gold really. However, they do not have the mega-budgets of the big boys, so well done Stoke. You broke the mould this year and the public loved you. In the Grand Pavilion another local authority, Birmingham City Council, won the President’s Award with their First World War recreation of the trenches, complete with a dog fight involving two ‘bedded-out’ aeroplanes. The gushing water cannons sent me scuttling for the loo though, so I was quite glad that I wasn’t in the one-way queue of geishas.