Helen Shaw our official photographer for the day crept into the garden at first light on judging day and took some atmospheric photographs before the sun became too bright and crowds too dense.  She also managed to capture some of the celebs as they went by. This slideshow is a selection of her photos accompanied by Lynyard Skynard singing Free Bird.

Gala Night at the Chelsea Flower Show is said to be the first day of the ‘season’. Only the glitterati can afford the tickets which sell for £328.  We get our tickets for free but whether we will be in any fit state to enjoy them is another matter. Nothing could be less glamorous than the final rush to get the garden ready. A dust cart has been parked opposite our garden all day churning rubbish noisily at 10 minute intervals.  One of the adjacent gardens has a crisis with its pond and has to get help from ‘Caroline’s Effluent Services’ and Caroline’s large pink tanker pumps out the offending pond water very noisily and very smellilly. This video shows Philippa trying to do some planting against this backdrop of mayhem.

The build-up at the Chelsea Flower Show is so surreal that it hardly came as a surprise to be asked “Are you a homeless person?”. In fact I felt quite proud, almost human for an instant. The solicitous enquiry came from the organisor of the Eden Project garden, shown in this video here. He had seen me going about with my cloth cap (on my head, I should add, not being proferred for small change) and Flip Video and he mistook me for one of the homeless because his garden is being built by homeless people and they have been provided with Flip videos to record the event. In fact, so he told me, the Eden project garden has also been designed by the homeless. A very brave experiment. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

15 show gardens are being built cheek by jowl and the noise is overwhelming. Each garden has a digger, a cement mixer, a dumper truck ; there is a constant stream of lorries making deliveries and of cranes lifting plants and materials into the gardens. In fact it’s a dangerous business taking photographs- I was very nearly mown down by a lorry carrying portable loos. Being mown down by a portable toilet is not the ideal way to meet on’es end- there wouldn’t be a straight face at the funeral.
In the midst of the cacophany is one oasis of tranquility- the Japanese garden being built by the renowned Japanese designer, Ishihara Kazuyuki. This video shows his workers, all of them Japanese, preparing some stone-work and the sound of their hammering is almost musical.

Philippa and I are at Painshill Park in Surrey for the recording of an interview for the BBC’s coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show. The BBC need to prepare in advance pieces about each of the show gardens for their “red button” facility and for their website. For this we have to pretend that the garden has been built and that we are at the Show standing in our garden. This requires significant feats of imagination, with which we both struggle , so early in the day. The interviews are taking place outdoors in an enchanting setting on a sunny morning. There are frequent interruptions because of the noise of children, geese, tractors and sirens. We begin in bright sunshine under clear skies but clouds start to emerge and, for reasons of continuity, we have to stop shooting every time the sun goes in. And so it’s stop start, stop start all morning so that before long our brains turn to mush.   The BBC crew, who are no doubt used to this, are endlessly patient and helpful and see us through it.  But it will need some pretty nifty editing to produce anything worth watching