Chelsea Flower Show: Saturday 28 May 2005. I’ve never had a serious interest in photographing flowers, though I have occasionally pictured some of those growing in my garden, roses, apple blossom etc and turned my phone on plants and bouquets given to Linda so she can thank the donors. And although I’ve gone with students and family to Kew Gardens and elsewhere and taken the odd snap, I have never actually visited the annual Chelsea Flower Show.
But in 2005 I was persuaded by a photographer friend to go with him to Chelsea on the final day of the show, where t the end of the last day on Saturday a bell starts a frenzied sale of many of the plants on display.
It’s long been one of the events of the London season for photographers as men and mainly women stagger out onto the streets and onto buses and tube carrying huge pots of impressive specimens.
I did wonder how many of these fine and formerly cosseted plants made it back to their carrier’s homes, and if so how long they survived. Some marriages are rumoured to have been ended as husbands dropped pots, broke off stems getting on to buses or crowded tube carriages, and otherwise destroyed the prized and expensive loot on the way home to Putney and Wimbledon.
I suspect I mainly went along for a social pre- and post-event pint with my mates, and I don’t think I ever went again in later years – there are so many other things to photograph. I only wrote a short and hard to find paragraph for My London Diary to go with the over 50 photographs I put on-line – here in full with the usual corrections.
“Chelsea Flower Show is the biggest event of the gardening season, and the crowds are huge. This year an extra day was added to cut down on the jams, though I don’t know how effective it is.
Unless you are a gardening photographer, the most interesting part of the whole event is the end, when many of the plants on show are sold off and proudly carried home by their purchasers.
As you can see from the pictures, they carry them along the streets to the bus stop or car park or coach, providing a rather unusual spectacle”
The previous year, 2004, I had met the same friend close to Victoria Station where many of those getting onto buses with flowers from the show alight “to photograph them as they poured of the buses carrying their prizes. After a minor navigation error involving a Wetherspoons pub we made it, and managed to take a few pictures.“
More pictures from Taking Chelsea Home On the Bus- 2004
More pictures from 2005 start here on My London Diary.
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