This was the second time I have visited the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, the first some ten plus years ago, and it was interesting to see how the show has grown. Last time the northside of the Long Water was for picnicking on with no stands or marquees or show gardens but provided a place to escape from the frantic bustle of the show and, on a sunny day, just chill for a while. Now the show is twice the size and the northside is as busy as the south and as such, makes for a long day to get round the whole show. This time, arriving late-morning via park and ride (never underestimate the delight a short ride in an old Routemaster double-decker can give to kids!), we headed straight for an early lunch to avoid the queues and get a chance to orientate ourselves and work out what we wanted to see.
Lunch was in the King’s Food Court, resplendent with its chandeliers and music from the nearby bandstand. We had a small shopping list, a shade sail for the garden and a rose for the new pergola and a desire to see the show gardens, the children’s zone and scarecrow competition, the climate zone, the Thai floating market, the Daily Mail pavilion and the Festival of Roses... anything else, given the time frame, would be a bonus. The crowds have grown in proportion to the show as well and I was pleased that the children had been issued with safety wrist bands at the entry gate, a good precaution, as the people with trolleys were on a mission to shop and had no scruples at all over barging past and splitting us up into the crowds. One lady even ran her plant-laden trolley over my foot without so much as a sorry in her hurry!

The Daily Mail pavilion was a delight, if a little disconcerting with its birdsong soundtrack. ‘The Beyond the Garden Wall’ garden by Hardy’s Cottage Plants was beautiful with sweetpea Matucana and a purple Ipomoea catching my eye among the fantastic long borders. There were two water rills and water was definitely a recurring theme throughout the show this year, both in the show gardens and falling from the sky! A couple of donkeys were a distraction for the kids and then we moved on through one of the Floral marquees. Remember our modeshort shopping list? Who can resist sweet peas..not me that’s for sure and I was tempted by ‘Lisa Marie’ (plum on silver) by Eagle Sweet Peas www.eaglesweetpeas.co.uk . We also purchased a Venus Fly Trap (pocket money sized). Moving over the Long Water towards the children’s zone, we passed the Thai Floating market which was a deceptively small stand and so packed we gave it a miss. While I wandered through the small show gardens the rest of the family went and voted on the scarecrow competition and tried out the children’s zone, complete with circus skills and strawberry pot painting.
For me, the best of the small show gardens on the northside were ‘The Sadolin Four Seasons Garden’, a lovely sunken courtyard with a twist, ‘Breathing Space…Thinking Place’ for the Samaritans, a beautiful oasis of silver and lilac/blue calm, ‘The Fire and Iron Garden – Whirling Butterflies’, wild and full of wonderful faerie-sculpture and ‘The Spirits Garden’, orange, enclosed and peaceful and with a gorgeous deep blue salvia . Heading back to the Southside we stopped off to admire a couple of the large show gardens, ‘Cuimhne’, a sculptural and thought-provoking piece that would be well-suited to a large open space or park and ‘The Burgbad Sanctuary’ a fantastically lush-feeling spa garden with beautiful big bowls full of water lilies nestling amid tropical planting and rectilinear water pools.

By this time we were ready for tea and so we headed back to the bandstand for tea and toasties while listening to some great rhythm and blues. Three-thirty and the crowds were heaving and we made our way towards the Climate Change Dome, past a few more show gardens, ‘The Magic Garden’ featured a fantastic wall made of interwoven tree roots, beautiful and textural but the ‘snow effect’ ground mulch didn’t work for me, nature does it much better. We stopped to chat to the Guerrilla Gardening chap www.guerrillagardening.org  and all loved his skip full of second hand plants. ‘The Porsche Garden’ stole the show for the kids – who could resist such a great gadget/toy in the front garden and I loved the shaggy green vertical walls and a water feature that elegantly gave a circular ripple across a still square of water.
‘The Dorset Cereals Playground’ garden featured very clever raised beds, incorporating a seating and table area in the middle – patios will never be the same and salads will never be so fresh to the table. Finally making it to the climate zone dome via a couple more gardens, we listened to the experts talk about what the future might hold while outside the heavens opened and we watched as everyone else got wet. This did not help the already soggy ground and although bark chips had been laid over the worst of the mud, by now it was squelching up over the metal walkways and making the going tough for motorised buggy users, prams and trolleys. A real favourite show garden on the southside was the gorgeous small garden ‘Widex Hearing Garden: Celebrating Sound’. A real hit with the kids, featuring a wall full of sound making objects, including those boingy metal spring door stops and handy drumsticks on strings to try out your musical skills on all manner of objects. Fantastic. It won best small garden and deservedly so.

Other gardens featured salad leaves as bedding plants, water in all its glorious forms from silver mirrored vertical water, winding rills, straight rills, water over spheres of metal and glass and even a water canal complete with a replica narrow boat. Walls were covered with grasses and herbs. Flower beds were layered and textural with lots of grasses, alliums and agapanthus for height. Yellow, the ‘now’ colour was interspersed with deep burgundies, orange, silvers, lilac-blues and swathes of green. Wood is the texture of the moment and small trees in chic urban spaces featuring cubes of green and water either still or bubbly. The conceptual garden ‘Forest2’ caught our eye with its ingenious optical illusion delivering a deeper message about global deforestation. Then we were at the Festival of Roses marquee and, while the roses were beginning to wane after a week of the show, the glorious scent was well worth leaving to the end to revive flagging spirits. I couldn’t resist a Peter Beales Roses catalogue www.peterbealesroses.com
and have since spent hours, trying to choose a rose! We never found any shade sails, fashion is such a fickle thing but we did see a whole zoo’s worth of animal statuary from horses made from horse shoes to full –sized stone gorillas and metalwork giraffes. Water features in the shape of trees, spheres of stone, glass and metal and agapanthus. A lot of agapanthus. Herbs and ‘edible planting’ in abundance and all manner of wildlife habitats and homes. By now people were leaving and the crowds were thinning out and we were all worn out. There was just time for a riverboat back to the park and ride and then home. Our shopping list? Long forgotten. Our memories of the day? Long may they last!