Stokesay Goes to Chelsea

After an anxious two weeks spent watching the shivering roses for any signs of flowers, the team mustered in force to pick large quantities of anything we could find in the gardens for several deliveries over the course of a week to florists creating work for the Chelsea Flower Show and Chelsea in Bloom, and other Real Life events which still were carrying on throughout this very busy week, which ended with a huge pick on Saturday 17th May, which Barney and I then took together to London on the afternoon of Sunday 18th. Millie Richardson and her team of able and energetic florists had already been working all week on several other Chelsea-related events, including a very magical wedding arch inside the marquee at Chelsea, with lovely framed original artworks from the Brambly Hedge story books. They looked a little tired as they helped us to unload the 42 towering buckets of mostly roses and rambling roses from the van, waiting for the go ahead to start work on their task of creating a naturalistic hedgerow, using only sustainably grown English flowers and foliage (much of which came from the Badminton Estate, where the harvesting of beautiful forest material is done as a part of the essential management of the woods), but much coffee must have been consumed as they then worked like a machine from 9:30 on the Sunday evening until 4:30 the following morning, in the dark, creating the most enormous, impactful, glorious and somehow soothing and enveloping hedgerow which seemed to be entirely in proportion with the enormous pavements, elaborate lamp posts, and curving sinuous river beside it. People making their way through the gates to visit the gardens within were on the scale of the hedgerow mice of Jill Barklem’s books, busying along to get at the good things and feeling a part of the natural world as they brushed aside fragrant trailing rose tendrils to enter. Photographs by the delightful and highly talented Andrea Gilpin of Wild Meadow.