A Floral Bouquet for Mother - London's Chelsea Flower Show


© Stuart Buchanan MacWatt

A friend who enjoys the Suite101 topic English Country Gardening, tells me that he is taking his wife and family to England for Mother's Day.

Instead of picking her a bunch of red roses from the garden on that day, the family will give her a Garden with 50,000 plants!

They will visit the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London.

The history of these Gardens reaches back to 1759, when the mother of George IIIlaid out part of her Estate as a botanical garden. Since the 1780s the Kew Gardens have been a repository for plants of economic, scientific or horticultural interest, collected from all over the world.

Entrance costs about $8 for an adult, or about $22 for a family. Wheelchair visitors enter free of charge.

Many of the great Gardens of England open to the public are at their most magical during budding May. To the sound of the cuckoo, This other Eden, rewards delighted visitors from all over the world with sunlit vistas of azalea, camellia, and rhododendron, majestic in their finest and most exuberant floral livery, breathtaking sweeps of vibrant color set amid majestic lawns of emerald green.

And to round off the merry month of May, the Chelsea Flower Show, highlight of the English gardening calender, and one of the great social events of the London summer season, opens to the public from 25th through 28th May.

The Chelsea Flower Show is held in the formal gardens of the Chelsea Royal Hospital, which bords the River Thames in the centre of London. Built for King Charles II in 1682, by architect and astonomer, Sir Christopher Wren, whose St.Paul's Cathedral once dominated a London skyline now cluttered with modern high rise buildings, the Hospital is the Royal retirement home of great architectural dignity for some 500 aged and infirm army veterans, the famed Chelsea Pensioners.

The Pensioners are distinctive in their summer uniform of bemedalled scarlet frock coat and black tricorn hat. They will pose for your photograph with customary courtesy, in return for the customary tip. Make a point of visiting the magnificent Great Hall .

Some 250,000 gardening enthusiasts, including Her Majesty the Queen, and of course the adored Queen Mum, will visit the Chelsea Flower Show, a colorful social occasion since 1913, and the premier annual showcase for members and affiliates of the 195 year old Royal Horticultural Society, the organisers.

Members of the prestigious professional Society of Garden Designers show off their garden landscaping talents with tranquil pools and fountains amid entrancing floral and arborial tableaux. Most of them undertake garden landscaping contracts for customers outside Britain.

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Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: View all related messages

5.   Apr 15, 1999 11:37 PM
Thanks Ian. By the way, I put a link from my latest article http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/english_country_gardening/18083, from a mention of the Chelsea Flower Show, to your article. ...

-- posted by JaneHollis


4.   Apr 15, 1999 2:48 PM
Cant wait to read your article in due course.
I shall of course link to that.

-- posted by Travelsleuth


3.   Apr 15, 1999 10:47 AM
Yes, Ian, I am a member of the RHS, and also the AGS, so you will definitely find me at their exhibit this year. Last year's display of stone troughs was absolutely stunning - no-one could believe th ...

-- posted by JaneHollis


2.   Apr 14, 1999 10:50 PM
Jane,

Delighted to hear that you are visiting the Chelsea Flower Show.
Are you a member of the RHS and thus able to go on Members Only Day with all the nobs?
Do us all a big favour and file an ar ...


-- posted by Travelsleuth


1.   Apr 13, 1999 11:54 PM
Ian
I will be one of those 250,000 gardening enthusiasts visiting the Chelsea Flower Show
this year. It is not to be missed and is a source of much gardening inspiration for me.
Easy on the pocke ...

-- posted by JaneHollis





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