Fashion produce show

The best designer stubble in town: fashion victims and floral wives are the essence of the Chelsea Flower Show. But so are the old standards: the municipal

Gardening is like sex, in that the messiest bits are often the most fun. The Chelsea Flower Show, where mess is rigorously excluded, therefore offers a sanitised version of the real thing. Of course those faultless flowers and pristine plantings have not been produced without a lot of people delving into the muck, but by show time all evidence of this has been methodically erased. As I meant to remark to Alan Clark, one of the few top Tories swarming around on Monday's preview day, Chelsea is a post-coital experience: all that most of us get is the cigarette and the satisfied smile.

Like any high-profile consumer industry, gardening is responsive to fashion. This year's fashion among opinion-formers has been to slag off the Chelsea Flower Show as having sold its soul to commercialism. The Sunday magazines ran long articles this week expressing horror at the way things were going, at how the show gardens were "a smug celebration of bad design", peopled by "ranks of suits and their floral wives, holding glasses of corporate champagne in their soft hands". Worse, "the Royal Horticultural Society has metamorphosed from a benign and paternalistic organisation into a commercial one." Horror!

No doubt the world would be a purer place if a show on this scale could be mounted on the combined resources of the National Delphinium Society and the Pontefract and Castleford Allotment Association, but that is not how life works, nor ever has. At lunch I found myself amid a bunch of orchid fanciers, including one who has been coming to Chelsea for 47 years. I asked him what had changed. "Nowadays you don't get the huge displays that the seed companies used to put on," he replied. So one kind of big business sponsorship has simply been replaced by another.

The critics are right to point out that most of the 23 show gardens bear little relation to gardening as we know it, just as haute couture is not what most of us wear on the streets. Every year the designers go in for more and more elaborate structures, overwhelming the green stuff planted beneath them. The Provencal terracotta farmhouse on BSkyB's stand took up more space than the garden in front of it. Near by, the perfumier Yves St Laurent had imported part of a Moorish garden, great for people hooked on electric-blue painted pavilions with a few token cactuses. The Country Life garden included a wrought-iron gate supported by two brick-built, bijou, habitable gatehouses: no doubt they will be snapped up when offered in one of the magazine's property ads after the show.

Behind the iron gate was a little wild meadow, filled with wire-mesh sheep, buttercups and cultivated stinging nettles. For some years now garden designers have felt obliged to add a token untamed area into their schemes, to prove their commitment to the environment - the horticultural equivalent of designer stubble. Even the prize-winning Daily Telegraph garden, a baffling composition of steel and smooth white stone supposed somehow to invoke the spirit of Virgil, found room for "random" herbs and wild flowers.

Amid all this studied scruffiness, I am probably alone in mourning the disappearance of the splendid formal municipal plantings that used to enliven the central marquee. They have been in decline for years, victims of local government budget pressures, but until a few years ago you could still gawp at the few lovingly crafted patterns of scarlet salvias, with "Morecambe" spelt out in pansies or, better still, in contrasting vegetables.

Those few municipalities to maintain a presence have felt obliged to abandon carpet bedding and go with the flow. Southend-on-Sea had a split garden. Half was a shingle area with fashionable wild plants, with the other bit inspired by the monastery garden at Prittlewell Priory - notable for the most enormous radishes I have seen.

Leeds city council teamed up with a local college to produce a "garden of harmony" that illustrates the Feng Shui principles of harnessing the earth's energy to produce peaceful living. After the show the garden will be installed at Roundhay Park in the city, where last weekend's riot suggests it is badly needed. Paul Green, the designer, was brimming with enthusiasm. "Did you know that Roundhay is the most popular park in Britain?" he challenged me. "I once saw Henry Kissinger in there."

The former US statesman was not at Chelsea on Monday, but there was no shortage of celebrities to pose for the cameras. They included the usual range of flower-hatted luvvies and supermodels, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Bob Geldof, David Hockney and a South African faith healer. The ultimate in cultural cross-fertilisation came when Nicole from the Renault TV ad was photographed brandishing the FA Cup - the association of Chelsea the show with Chelsea the team not having been lost on Sky's PR people.

John Major, when in power, used the show to promote the image of a prime minister at ease with himself. He was there on Monday with Norma, protesting to reporters that he was now "yesterday's news". The present government, though, ignored the event. It is usual for a minister - generally the Secretary of State for Agriculture - to say a few words at the preview day lunch, but Jack Cunningham turned down the invitation and an early opportunity to forge good relations with our largest leisure industry. When the guests were told by Sir Simon Hornby, the RHS president, that there would be no guest speaker, they seemed relieved at the respite from new Labour's trident piety.

I have saved the best news for last. Those who follow these things assured me that lupins are on the way back. Every year my first place of pilgrimage is to the stand of Woodfield Brothers of Stratford-upon-Avon, usually by the wall of the marquee. It never changes - nothing but tidy rows of lupins, the most phallic of all flowers, pointing stiffly towards the roof, defying the vagaries of taste. For years they were out of favour but Maurice Woodfield kept the faith and brought them here year after year, always in perfect condition, the hundred or so best blooms from the 1,800 he sows every year. "They lost popularity because people weren't buying good stock. You have to give them a lot of depth of soil to produce really good ones - it isn't just what you see above the ground."

Now that cottage gardens are back in vogue, so are lupins. Several show gardens included their colourful spikes proudly reaching for the sky.

Such small delights are the real essence of the event, rather than the big-name gardens that win publicity and opprobrium in equal measure. Chelsea is a caricature of a gardener's maximum expectations. Everything is set out perfectly, the seasons manipulated so that it is all in bloom at the same time - daffodils alongside roses, irises with autumn vegetables. Gardeners know the real word is never like this. There will be struggles, disappointments and pitfalls; some results will fall well below our expectations - but there will also be triumphs that give us particular pleasure.

What better metaphor for the legislative programme of a brand new government? And what a pity no member of that government turned up to draw the moral.