Tim Richardson: A trout stream in the backyard? Now that really is pure fantasy

When is a garden not a garden? When it’s a trout stream. The question arises because the garden most tipped to win the top accolade at the Chelsea Flower Show next week is the Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden, designed by Dan Pearson (who was commissioned to work on the Garden Bridge).

The design is based on a re-creation of a slice of the great Derbyshire estate — teleported into the Royal Hospital showground. The planting around it is being designed to look as natural as possible, with the hand of the designer barely figuring. It’s all very much in line with current trends in planting, which look to the way plants disport themselves in nature for inspiration. At his own new farmhouse property near Bath, for example, Pearson is not “designing” the garden as such but managing it as a small estate, with a light touch and no visible decorative flourishes. According to this slightly cultish fashion, we don’t have gardens nowadays — we have “plant communities”. Insects are not pests to be eradicated but “wildlife” to be cherished and conserved. Percy Thrower must be turning in his grave.

Aside from the obvious question as to whether this trout stream will be flowing with sponsor Laurent-Perrier’s champagne, does it fit the Chelsea bill? After all, Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) rules state that a design must be imaginable as a “back garden”. I suppose one could argue that the Chatsworth estate is de facto the back garden for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, and that this show garden is a small portion of it, but that does seem to be pushing it, even in the rareified atmosphere of the Chelsea Flower Show. Perhaps it will only be the Queen who will exclaim “At last, a real back garden!”

Now I am not one of those who bemoans the way Chelsea bears no relation to “real-life” gardening. I don’t go to Chelsea for that. I go for the fantasy, and for the best displays of the art of horticulture on the planet. If home gardening is street fashion, then Chelsea is haute couture. If I want an old garden hose and some empty pots, I can stay at home. But at the same time I do wonder whether a slice of natural landscape has much at all to do with horticulture, at a show which is after all organised by the RHS. Last year’s Chelsea had so much of the hedgerow about it that it might just as well have been the Chelsea Cow Parsley Show. And to judge by the planting lists circulated by the 2015 cadre of designers, this time around it could be Chelsea Foxglove Show.

The emergence of the trout-stream-as-garden is possibly indicative of a loss of a sense of direction among the show’s organisers, following a string of slightly uninspiring Chelsea shows in recent years (the nadir, ironically, being the centenary year in 2013). There is now no clear identity for Chelsea show gardens. It used to be that they were essentially display gardens along the Ideal Home Show model, replete with practical ideas which householders could use. Or else they were glorified nurserymen’s showcases — especially for rhododendron and azalea growers — though the RHS put a stop to that a few years ago when they abolished the showground’s “Rock Bank”, traditionally the home of these dated extravaganzas.

At some point in the mid-Nineties, the old display-garden model began to give way to a variety of other approaches. Chic modernist designs became de rigueur after a particularly successful example “won” the show in 1997 (I remember it well because that year I was managing the next-door garden, a much more traditional number sponsored by Country Life magazine). Symbolic designs — often conceived as “journeys” from darkness to light — became the preferred option of the charities who like to sponsor gardens because of the guaranteed TV coverage. This odd sub-culture of garden design was extended into the realm of finance, as the banks and investment houses — which have long favoured Chelsea as a place to entertain clients — developed their own kind of symbolic garden, with horticulture used to embody the concept of “investment in the future”.

You don’t visit Chelsea to see the best structural and spatial garden design, given the almost impossible brief handed to designers — a double whammy of RHS rules and sponsors’ demands. It’s the planting which matters, and Chelsea remains the best barometer of connoisseurial planting style in the world.

Whatever the RHS says publicly, the judges make their awards on the basis of the texture, tone and sophistication of the plantings, with marks deducted for particularly egregious examples of sculpture or “water features”. This bias has meant most Chelsea designers have since the Nineties increasingly conceived of their designs as vessels for planting beds, with more space given over to this than there would be in a real garden.

More recently, the ecological concerns currently besetting us have been echoed in Chelsea show-garden design (lots of green roofs, water recycling and “rain gardens”) though there is far less of that this year. In its place we have the concept of the community garden influencing Chelsea design, with both Morgan Stanley and Homebase jumping on that bandwagon for marketing purposes — though there is precious little evidence that they are supporting such activity out in the real world.

And tucked in amidst all this as a constant are the unapologetically romantic, English cottage gardens — which always win the “people’s choice” award — and the “foreign” gardens sponsored by tourist boards, wineries and luxury property companies. The latter usually fall down on planting quality but add a welcome note of exotica (the most exotic of all was the “Martian” garden which won best-in-show in 2007).