A flower show is a very, very, strange thing. They celebrate botany in incredibly old-fashioned ways, and the backbone of them is usually a huge tent filled with plant nurseries who spend most of their time comparing notes on why nothing is quite as good as peat for bringing on seedlings.
On TV, the gardens we get to see are cleverly filmed so they appear at least twice as big as they are in person, and you rarely get to hear about any of the truly interesting stuff happening behind the scenes.
But, despite the general weirdness of flower shows, and the swathes of rude middle classes competitively barging past with expensive trolleys filled with expensive plants, there’s something kind of magical about them.
Firstly, they’re special because of what they are. They could exist without any bells and whistles and I’d still adore them, Tatton especially. When you strip them back, they are a celebration of plants, and an excuse to talk to people about them. OK, so not everyone’s a gardener, but in a world filled with huge events focused on football, music, film, and theatre, it’s actually pretty lovely to escape and talk about something that makes you feel good, to people who know it best.
But that still doesn’t justify why we’re talking about it here in Art in Liverpool, a paper dedicated to visual art. So, secondly…
RHS Tatton Park Flower Show, if you don’t know it, is about a thirty minute drive from the end of Edge Lane. It happens every year, and has done since 1999 (coincidentally, the same year Liverpool Biennial and Independents Biennial said hello to the world). It’s the furthest north that the RHS dare to tread with their flower shows (nearly all within an hour’s drive of London), so offers an opportunity for garden designers, horticulturalists and artists to show off their botanical skill on their own doorstep.
This year, there were countless local entries, stall holders, and supporting artists behind the gardens and stalls, so we went in search of some of them.
Conal McGuire was the first designer to really stop me in my tracks, with a garden called ‘Brickyard’. After chatting to his mum, who was proudly guarding the garden, it was glorious to find out that the garden was, as well as being designed by a young scouser, with a passion for, and knowledge of, planting, detailed by Granby Workshop, with terrazzo-style bricks and pot stands, and advised on by Andrea Ku from B4Biodiversity (both exceptional local projects). Each crafted piece of hard landscaping broke up the dense pathways, offering more to reflect.
Ian Colligan, two gardens away, had welded together old sections of pipe to create a bio-char kiln that sat gorgeously at the centre of the sweeping garden designed by Christine Leung of Taking Root in Booltle.
Both the designer and artist were involved in and supported by the artists and botanists at Scouse Flower House, who had again collaborated on a multidisciplinary art & garden installation called HALT, elsewhere in the park. The anti-tank hedgehog, overwhelmed by wildflower was a gorgeous reflection on the relationship between war and wildlife.
Both gardens, as well as the smaller installation, were gorgeously planted and practical in their own way, but the faith they put in artists to produce integral pieces of their design. That elevated them from the typical slabs of garden you usually see at these shows, to gardens you could live in.
Seeing the work of any artist in this format is pretty special. It’s not unique to flower shows, but it’s a regular occurrence at them. Instead of seeing works of art and craft displayed for sale, in white spaces, or cleaned up tidy rooms, we’re seeing them embedded into concrete, or filled with burned biochar, ready for use.
RHS Tatton Park might not be a regular feature in Art in Liverpool, but it’s worth considering how crucial the setting can be for arts and craft. With Southport Flower Show in September, and Knowsley Flower Show in August, it’s worth exploring if you can [note: Knowsley’s free…].
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Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
Images, Kathryn Wainwright
