We are inching closer and closer to the end product.  I realize that inching may not be the best speed at which to approach something as important as Chelsea Flower Show but for me it is fine.  It’s like hunting a stag:  The stalking has to be carried out with enormous care and diligence as each footstep is carefully considered before it is taken in case one stumbles in the heather and ruins ones chances. This all takes a considerable amount of time and I imagine is quite boring to watch but then right and the end, bang! The drama comes all at once, it’s over in a second and you’ve got your prize  (hopefully).

In this rather tenuous and fragile analogy only last week I was still on the train on my way to the Glens.  But now I have disembarked, checked into a rather chic hotel with a huge roaring fire, partaken of a hearty breakfast, donned unfeasible amounts of tweed and the prerequisite funny hat and I am clambering up a hill with a shotgun broken over my arm and a full hip flask in my pocket.  So what has brought on this sudden change of pace you cry?

Well last week I had a meeting with water feature man, contractor man and rendering man all at once and much was discussed most of which fell into the ‘essential but tedious’ category which I then put into a box onto which I have written the word ‘progress’ in a thick black pen.  And then this week I have visited bench making man (more of that next week) and sculpture men.  Graham and Steve who are from Northern Ireland are, it has to be said, a little like actors in a Guy Ritchie movie.  We met for the first time on the pavement outside an electroplaters in Walthamstow and I spent the next few hours being blasted by wave after wave of heavily accented enthusiasm but more importantly I was able to see something which had actually been made and existed somewhere other than in my mind or on a piece of paper.  In fact it was only samples but it was a massive beginning if such a thing is possible?  There were two panels of the rings that make up the sculpture so we can experiment with the finish and the size of the copper ‘washers’ and the welds and everything else and also a curved one third scale model of an entire section of the sculpture.  This I only saw briefly and it was upside down and covered in streaks but it was a thing of beauty and although we still have weeks of stalking ahead of us it felt good to be in the company of these two experienced hunters.  Over the next few weeks we should resolve all the details and the actual sculpture can be made and I promise to drop the whole stag hunting thing.

I have recently heard that the judging is being changed at Chelsea this year because the judging was not up to scratch in 2011.  The most experienced judge was not present and there was not a suitably experienced replacement.  Consequently the tried and tested judging process partially failed for the first time.  A gold medal was awarded to one garden which clearly didn’t deserve it and one or maybe two gardens which should probably have been Gold were only awarded silver gilt.  

The knee jerk reaction from the RHS following several complaints has been to change the process rather than just go back to the tried and tested system using experienced judges.  Some of their changes are sensible, for example not allowing the people on the initial selection panel to subsequently judge the gardens they chose.  What is not so sensible is that they are talking of abolishing the hands in the air voting method in favour of a points system.  In the past the gardens were assessed by three assessors on the preceding Sunday.  They would read the brief and based on points would recommend a medal to the judges who on Monday morning would then vote in agreement or disagreement by putting their hands in the air.  Now they want the judges to use a points system instead.

A few months ago I judged the Gardening World Cup in Japan using a points system and it doesn’t work.  The result was that there wasn’t a proper spread of medals.  Gardens which were clearly bronze medals scraped into the silver category alongside gold medal standard gardens which didn’t quite get enough points.  The chief judge made the decision to re-grade everything thus making the points system totally redundant.  Not only is this system untested by the RHS but they are wheeling it out at Chelsea, their highest profile show instead of trialing at a lesser show.  The RHS are therefore running the risk of messing up the judging two years in a row. 

As a designer I am not happy about this as I know how the old system works and this is just introducing unnecessary uncertainty into an already stressful process.  Who knows if this new system is going to work at all? From the RHS point of view this is also massively risky.  Sponsors pay a lot of money for a garden at Chelsea and they expect to receive a lot of publicity in return.  If you don’t get a gold medal you receive a significantly reduced amount of publicity.  Cancer Research UK, the sponsors of one of the ‘should have got a gold’ gardens of 2011 have now pulled out of Chelsea after 9 years.  Without high profile sponsors Chelsea is sunk and without a reliable judging process sponsors will lose interest and so will designers like myself.

Stop Press!  I’ve just heard that the RHS is not going to roll out any new system at Chelsea until they have trialed it first alongside the existing one.  So huge relief there, and what’s more, since writing this blog the new touchy feely RHS have also invited designers to a forum to discuss any possible changes.  So I will eat my words…..although I’m still not sure what was wrong with the old system?

I’ve had an email from a colleague who is also at Chelsea this year.  I won’t name her (or him) but she (or he) has also started having the Chelsea dreams.  In her (ok, its definitely a her) latest one which she describes as a ‘wake up in terror in the middle of the night nightmare’ I am her Chelsea neighbour and it has come as something of a surprise to her that I am constructing a life size galleon (Play Mobil genre) and am filling my garden with pine chests of drawers and bedside tables.  This in itself is not bothering her but apparently I am stacking it rather high and therefore she can see it over the boundary wall which divides our plots.  This is not only against the rules but is frankly discourteous and she is cross.

My amateur analysis is that because my garden is ‘Arts and Crafts’ she has made a subconscious link to furniture hence the pine.  Although I am disappointed that she has essentially gone down market with my concept.