For the past hundred and one years, the Chelsea Flower Show has celebrated the best in English horticulture and garden design. Sponsored by the Royal Horticultural Society, it is a much-anticipated five-day plant extravaganza that attracts thousands of people. While not nearly as fusty as it once was, it is necessarily bound by a certain amount of tradition and structure. Regular people, especially those with modest incomes, can only gaze with awe—or other emotions—at the sponsored exhibition gardens, which cost a great deal to design and build. The Chelsea Flower Show is a glorious spectacle, with something for everyone; but several years ago, garden writer Tim Richardson came up with an idea for an event that was complementary, but bigger, more diverse and as all-inclusive as possible. The Chelsea Fringe Festival was born.
First staged in 2012, the Fringe Festival has gained in popularity every year and even spawned offshoot festivals far from its London nexis. It is staffed and run by hundreds of volunteers and includes all manner of large and small show gardens, art installations and horticulture-related activities. Unlike the Chelsea Flower Show, which is held for a relatively short time on a single site, the Chelsea Fringe Festival has myriad locations. It lasts for a month rather than five days, allowing Festival goers to attend the maximum number of events. Imagination is the only limitation for participants. In the words of the official website, “Anyone can enter a project – as long as it’s interesting, legal and about gardens, flowers, veg-growing or landscape.”
And those projects run the gamut from roof gardens to funky art displays. Community gardens open their doors for public inspection and even august institutions like the Chelsea Physic Garden and the National Trust stage special events. Sometimes the exhibits themselves are mobile. In its first year, the Fringe Festival featured the “Bicycling Beer Garden,” a trailer covered with plantings installed in beer kegs, bottles and similar containers, hitched to a bicycle and hauled around to various featured locations. Guerilla gardeners, who specialize in small, often unsanctioned gardens, show off plantings in potholes, puddles and other unlikely spaces. Rooftop gardeners invite the public up many flights of stairs to see unique versions of urban agriculture. The whole Fringe Festival is colorful, slightly chaotic and perfectly in keeping with two grand British traditions—eccentricity and horticulture.
During last year’s festival, visitors could see a neighborhood installation consisting of a mile of miniature herb gardens planted in a collection of apple crates arrayed end to end. In another location, parking spaces were turned into pop-up urban vegetable plots. A hotel hosted an evening of nature-themed poetry readings and a series of London subway stations were linked by a network of with flower-filled steel gutters.
One of the most significant effects of the Chelsea Fringe Festival is the encouragement of what the organizers have dubbed “fringe gardening.” This is gardening any time and any place, on soil that the gardener owns, leases, borrows or simply deems in need of some kind of plant. A fringe gardener might decide one day to grow rutabaga in a chimney pot on the balcony; lob a seed-impregnated clay ball into a vacant lot; or create a hanging garden in a small apartment. The movement is about obeying the dictates of personal inspiration, even when that inspiration flies in the face of conventional wisdom or conventional good taste. In short, the fringe gardening movement seeks to do for gardening what the advent of the Internet did for communications—empowering more people to express themselves in more ways.
The Royal Horticultural Society has blessed the Chelsea Fringe Festival, wisely deciding that any activity that promotes gardening is good for the RHS. The Festival is not aimed exclusively at young gardeners, but its informal approach and inexpensive entrance fees make it more attractive and accessible to younger people. With its brash, free-for-all appeal, it helps pave the way for its own future as well as that of the Chelsea Flower Show. After all, today’s guerilla gardener might well be tomorrow’s innovative designer and possibly a future Chelsea medalist.
The Chelsea Fringe Festival helps reaffirm the place of gardening as an accessible art form. It sows its own kind of horticultural seeds.