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

The mosaic which Maggy Howarth is creating for the Victorian Aviary Garden is 12 square metres in size, which may not sound much but is the size of the average spare bedroom- in other words pretty damn massive when you think that it’s made entirely of pebbles. I went to Maggy’s workshop today to see how things were coming along. It’s about half finished, with the main part of the design, the Peacock, laid out in one enormous piece outside and the rest , including the border, in sections on several large tables in the workshop. I’m completely taken aback by the intricacy of the work and the quality of the craftsmanship. It’s awe-inspiring. We checked the time table and Maggy gave a big gulp when I confirmed that the mosaic needs to be at Chelsea for May 13th, which is less than four weeks from now. Mark, her only assistant, is away installing a mosaic in Gatehead. As soon as he gets back, it will be flat out for them both until the mosaic is safely installed.

When Sally and I first visited Kirkstone in January it was so cold that Sally’s toes turned to ice and took hours to recover. What a contrast with today- the sun is so fierce that I have to wear a hat to protect my head from sunburn. I’m at Kirkstone with Philippa and Mark for what will probably be our last visit before the show. We have come to discuss the steps and we need to decide how best to lay the slate which will cover them. Nick goes through the options and recommends that we lay the slate in a “pineapple chunk” pattern, which will form a good contrast with the slate on the floor of the Aviary. We try to put ourselves in the shoes of the craftsmen who would have tackled the problem in Victorian times. “Pineapple chunks” is probably not the technical term they would have used. But we get the gist and pineapple chunks it is. Nick has a full size template and lays out the slate as he would like it to be, marking the pattern with chalk. His attention to detail is impressive and after 90 minutes of discussion we leave in good spirits, warmed by the sun.