h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm trying to work out what it is about the Chelsea Flower Show that I hate so much!

Is it the la-de-da factor? It certainly seems to have a very stuffy atmosphere. Having that Jennie Bond one presenting programmes about it doesn't help much...

I don't know. There's something so stultifying about getting a panel of judges to form a jury about a garden.

Then there's the fakeness of the gardens. Thousands of plants grown with artificial light and heating so you can have snowdrops, hostas and echinacea all flowering at the same time of year, plonk them in a static setting for a week, and tear it all down again.

(I was going to volunteer to help out at one of the show gardens. Turned out it would have cost me upwards of £300 on accomodation etc, plus about 5 days of back-breaking work thrown in for free! Perhaps it's just sour grapes!)

I would love to go to chelsea just once. I know what you mean though. Some of the 'fake' gardens are awful Not to mention any names, but the one with the coloured balls suspended over the so called garden was terrible. Who wants a garden like that eh!
I guess with alot of old traditions, chelsea flower show has alot of pomp & circumstance about it, with hooray henry's at every corner. I do like to see what new plants are going to be available and some of the inside displays are wonderful, so it DOES have some good parts to it.

I've never faniced it because with all the crowds you'd never see anything.

And I don't see the point of watching it on tv... if I can't smell, feel and hear as well as see that's 75% of the point of a garden gone.

We would love to go there once, but geography hampers our plans a tad ... The tv is but a surrogate, however we enjoy the palaver of ye olde Alan Titchmarsh and ye jolly Diarmuid Gavin so much that we don't miss that much of the smells...

And be fair: on the telly you can have a better view of the gardens than when walking amongst countless others... no bad b.o. from others.. that's a smell we could do without.