Chelsea 2010: Day 1

After 5 days of hard painstaking cutting and positioning over 700 silver birch stumps we stood back and admired our handywork.

We had mapped out the garden to make life easier for ourselves once at Chelsea show ground.

Day 1 started well and I took the train to Victoria and walked the short distance past all the lovely shops. I was reminded of last year and feelings of anxiety about the imminent arrival of our first baby. I was also becoming more excited about the prospect of being back onsite at the greatest garden show.

I approached my landscapers who looked a bit confused and decided to deliver me a Gordon Brown style “news sandwich”. Which went something along the lines of:
“Weather’s great!”
“Garden is back to front”
“Got you a cup of tea”

It took a few seconds to sink in that my garden plan, the design I had refined and crafted for the past 6 months, was in fact designed for a mirror image of the space I saw before me.

I kept very calm under the circumstances and realised that the only thing that was effected by this oversight was that my jigsaw of a stumpery would no longer fit. All our preparation was wasted.

We’ve resolved the problem but not a good start!