Chelsea
It’s that time of the year again where I give my unsolicited opinion on the sycophantic puke-fest that is Chelsea. So, here goes! (It’s great not having a credit rating or career to ruin!) This is my assessment based purely on my instagram feed.
The Dog Shit. Preying on the UK averager’s uber-love of the Canid. I hope this garden has a piss-bleached lawn, piles of roundworm ridden shit hiding beneath assemblages of crisp bags and leaves, random ankle-breaking holes dug in vital access areas, Lupins ripped out of the ground and flung about as freshly killed game, a couple of locked in copulating hounds, perhaps some stolen underwear strewn with the crotches missing and some shit-filled bags dangling from shrubs. If the pool isn’t filled with parvovirus and kennel cough virus by now, it’s not really for dogs.
The Rusty One. Created by the sounder heads in horticulture, not that they’d call it horticulture because that’s high-falutin, it’s clearly Gardening (of the craft kind). These lads despise the “industry” but also dwell deeply within it to the point that they have become so aware of their predicament it’s created a horticultral profession meta-state.. They all fucked off before the show opened to prove their total rejection of the whole thing. Absolute rebels. The reason the garden only got a silver-gilt is because the RHS didn’t want to support a project that was clearly full of champagne socialists and might have been something about cliimate change.
One With Roses. Romance. A glass thing.
Something With Concrete.
My favourite display of everything that is wrong with EVERYTHING. The Culty One. Bankrolled by South African billions (the white questionable sort of course). It’s not a puke-inducing example of colonial inheritance at all because they had some black guys playing saxaphone at the launch! The matchy matchy uniforms, the behavioural elocution of the staff, the very high-end detail that makes every average millionaire wet; the imported wines, xerophytes, substrates and board members from their other billionaire wank-fest in South Africa kept clogging up my insta feed in corporately art-filtered , soft focused little nuggets of capitalistic shit.
The rusty one again.
The Pavillion from what I can tell was full of the Irish bloke with ferns, that other bloke with ferns and low and behold, ANOTHER South African display, this time imported Proteaceae by the fist-ful and bank-rolled by yet more billionaire white dude’s money. In fact, come to think of it Chelsea is a very, VERY white sort of thing.
Then there is the procession of, let’s be honest, mostly bland UK celebrities. Donning frocks, their dogs (of course), champagne, natty suits and barely an hour’s worth of horticultural knowledge between most of them. It’s good for the RHS profile though innit! Much more attention having Fiona-fucking-Bruce stood on the sacred ground than one of the many enthusiastic, knowledgeable, hard-grafting but poor as fuck (and diverse) actual UK hoticulturists! Why would you open up such an event to Plebs ffs! They get their chance to see it by volunteering their time and skill for free to build the fucking thing, .. It’s great for their CV…
