Garden designers play it safe?

Garden designers play it safe at Chelsea, says Diarmuid Gavin. (Gavin is of course the soi disant 'naughty boy' of the garden design world.)

In Camilla Turner's May 19th Telegraph piece he spells out how young garden designers...... well how young garden designers do what any realistic designer does really. Design what people will actually want and crucially will be able to pay for!

And how disappointing is that? Well, mega apparently! They are portrayed as career building, playing it safe. 'Designers want to make a name for themselves and get employed'

Boring! Apparently if you do not match his ..... shall we be kind and call it zaniness?..... you somehow lack 'intellect or passion'! Of course if there were more Gavins he would be the less for it. In any human group the maverick stands out precisely because  they are the one off.

His crane winching its curiously shaped gazebo into the Chelsea sky was the talk of the 2011 RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Crowds queued and shoved for the chance of  getting on board.

As I stood there two young girls shouted 'Hey Diarmuid, give us a ride.' And laughed roguishly at each other. And shortly afterwards he did indeed give them a ride in his pink pavilion. But was this really showmanship or just being  a bit like a bus conductor?

And, as in the playground, after a while the stand out becomes a little tedious and it's more a kind of a weary exasperation: 'So what is he up to now?'

Well this year, the plants revolve and levitate. Of course the RHS, bless its little cotton socks, likes to leaven its sometimes rather stodgy loaf with the odd pinch of yeast because it gives the show what Maggie Thatcher called the 'the oxygen of publicity'. Hence the notorious plasticene  garden.

But RHS Chelsea Flower Show, for all the celebrity razzmatazz it now has, is actually a trade show. Gimmicks do a disservice to the garden design trade. What the trade needs is some reality for the guys out in the field.

What about the show gardens being real gardens, real spaces which people can live in, client brief, real budgets, stated costs? Pit designer against designer, designing the same size space, for the same clients and the same budget. And watch them slug it out.

Instead we have revolving plants!

How useful is that for an industry that must struggle to seem relevant as we teeter on the brink of yet another recession? As we angst about brexit, immigration and ISIS? Gavin also does himself a disservice too, because underneath the 2011 crane was some of the most beautiful planting design in the show.

Sinuous paths wound amongst textural planting and the inkiest of round ponds. Sublime! And perfectly visible from the ground as indeed most gardens have to be.

But what you remember is the pink prosthesis.

How you long for the guy to stop being 'the naughty boy' and concentrate on the design.

R