Hampton Court Flower Show Part One

I learnt this week that my maternal grandmother had lived in East Molesey as a child and used to go across the river to Hampton Court Palace to play in the gardens there and was shooed away by the gardeners at the time. This would have been in the early 1900s I think, over a hundred years ago.


The flower show at Hampton Court is the largest flower show in the world and has been going since 1990 and was initially sponsored by Network Southeast. It was seen as a way to encourage rail travel and boost funding for the royal palaces.They withdrew support in 1992 and the first RHS show was in 1993. I last went in 2002  and was able to go again this year. The train was packed from Clapham Junction- mainly with middle aged women- who all got off at Hampton Court. It took about ten minutes to get off the platform and the we all trooped across the bridge and walked along the river to the entrance of the show at the back of the palace gardens.

We had to queue to get in but eventually made it. We decided it is a bit like a festival for middle aged people (myself included), although the toilets were quite acceptable!
It is an enormous site and I had already decided that the priority was to see the show gardens and have a look in the floral marquee. The day was quite changeable and there were frequent showers, but fortunately these were short lived and we did not get soaked. I was amazed by the number of people who appeared quite frail, but managed to contend with a site that was quite muddy and slippery at times.


 We started off looking at the show gardens and it just so happened that the one declared best in show was one of the first we came to. The labelling of the gardens was done in such a way that we could only see the name of the garden and what medal it had got once we had gone past it, which with the crowds could be a little tricky at times. It was called "I am, because of who we are" The idea behind it being interlocking circles of single plant species which then combine to make a greater impact - contribution and participation are good for the world.

This is what it looked like - the white foxgloves, tiarella and grasses in amongst the birch trees made a very attractive scene.


The World Vision garden had two grass domes - one rising above a reflective pool and one sunken into it to represent half the world's children living in poverty. Surrounding all this was a border including Verbena bonariensis, alliums and grasses.
 It is quite hard when you go round to know what each garden is trying to show and I had purposefully not looked before we went, but some things you don't see the significance of until you read the catalogue on the train home. The sunken dome looked quite inviting to climb into - I don't know what it was made of. This garden won a gold medal.

One of the other main show gardens that we saw was to highlight the problem of an overactive bladder and was  a brightly coloured garden with bright pink walls and giant pink taps. There was also a giant granite ball surrounded by water. It won a silver- gilt medal.

This one looked particularly bright on a dull day and showed that brightly coloured flowers can work well together. Again there were grasses as well as plants such as cosmos, achillea and crocosmia.