Best Ever Chelsea Flower Show!

Today the Queen's visits the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show for a Private View. She will be escorted around the displays laid out in the grounds of the Royal Hospital gardens by the RHS's new President, Sir Richard Carew Pole. Later in the evening he will host the RHS charity gala when celebrities and garden sponsors will start to make inroads into the 3,000 bottles of champagne, 8,000 bottles of wine and 18,000 glasses of Pimm's that will be drunk at the Show by 155,000 visitors over the next five days. Today's £350 a head gala marks a floral start of London's summer social season in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, famed home of the Chelsea Pensioners since the reign of Charles II.

The Chelsea Flower Show has been the gardening highlight of the social season ever since Queen Mary opened the Show at the Royal Hospital after the RHS moved its venue from the Temple Gardens on the Thames Embankment in 1911. This year however the Show looks set to become the social event of the year with sponsors like Merill Lynch Investment Management arranging hospitality space to accommodate up to 3,500 people. A spokesperson for the glossy magazine Harpers & Queen, one of the many garden sponsors is quoted in the press stating: "The Chelsea Flower Show is the smartest social event in the English calender. It's not second-rate soap stars; it's really important, influential achievers who go, people who really matter. That's why companies like to go and be seen there."

We gardeners who are not a part of today's celebrity A-list haughtyculture will visit the Chelsea Flower Show for the down to earth horticulture - even if we are not invited to get outside the contents of one of those bottles of 'bubbly' in the Merrill Lynch 'hospitality' pavilion. Beneath the social gloss this show is about flowers and gardening. Chelsea has a magnetism that sets the gardener's adrenalin flowing, firing the imagination of everyone with green-fingers, be it Prince Charles, creating a garden paradise at Highgrove in Gloucestershire or Daisy Smith with a small backyard in Tooting, South London.

The Prince of Wales, who approaches gardening with a dedicated passion, is exhibiting again, building upon experience he gained last year when he gained a Gold/Silver Award. This year he has entered a design for a 'Healing Garden' in association with garden consultant Jennie Blum. Every plant shown in the garden, which he has dedicated to his beloved grandmother the late Queen Mother, is used in medicine. Those of us who suffer with back problems will sympathise with the Prince who admitted to an BBC TV interviewer that "I have to kneel to dig because of my back." He is now obviously hooked on exhibiting at the Chelsea Flower Show. "I love the designing of it", he said of his exhibit. "I love creating a picture with plants."

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