View from the Lab: The gardens at Chelsea Flower Show are artificial - but then so are some of the world's most celebrated rainforests, says Steve Jones.
19 May 2009
Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking at the Monday Lunch at the Chelsea Flower Show with, as a first course, a tour of the show itself hosted by the president of the Royal Horticultural Society. The real honour is not mine but, in this bicentennial year, Charles Darwin's, the great botanist and soil scientist who is also remembered for having written The Origin of Species.
Darwin spent 40 years working in his own garden at Downe in Kent and made many marvellous discoveries on insect-eating plants, on orchids, on the movement of roots and shoots, and more. For him, plants were experimental organisms and he wrote dozens of letters to the Gardeners' Chronicle on manure, on the best kind of rope to haul buckets out of wells, and on a rain of snail shells in the Isle of Wight. His blessed plot was a working one, furnished not only with a heated greenhouse but rich in gooseberries and apples. He would, no doubt, have been bemused by this week's artistic pretensions at Chelsea: the Plasticine garden, the plant display that mimics a coral reef, and even by The Daily Telegraph's terrace of granite, transparent building and stylised water creek.