Forget Wimbledon – I know summer’s here when I’m sweltering on the tube, searching for my sunglasses or getting leered at by creeps
As a newish gardening enthusiast, I found myself properly aware of Chelsea flower show for the first time this year. It looked wonderful – beautiful green things – but I don’t really understand. People build gardens? Then transport them to a park, somehow? Then other people, including celebrities (mostly in the “might appear in one of those cosy Best Marigold-style TV travel shows” category), dress up to come and look at the gardens? It seems like something you’d struggle to explain to a foreign visitor (though other cultures have those: the French national agriculture show appoints a cow “muse”; this year’s, a five-year-old heifer called Ovalie, was described as “rustic, robust, docile and highly adaptable”).
Chelsea is mysterious because it’s part of a bigger British mystery: the “season”, a series of events I’ve had to consult Tatler to try to understand. The historical rationale – nearby entertainment for aristocrats who came to London at the precise time of year their country estates were at their most beautiful (why not do it in winter when most of Britain is mud?) to find a spouse who wasn’t too close a cousin – no longer exists. Yet the remnants (boat races, opera, horse stuff, tennis matches) are viewed with reverence as a quintessential distillation of the British spring and summer and another excuse to spam us with pictures of the royal family.
