Chelsea Flowers

London’s celebration summer kicked off this week with the Chelsea Flower Show, which presages the Queen’s Jubilee (her sixtieth year on the throne) and the Olympics as one occasion to sit in traffic and admire the yards of patriotic bunting that have been strung over every intersection in town. The Flower Show, which has been put on most years since 1862 by the Royal Horticultural Society, is the Westminster Kennel Club dog show for plants. 2012’s Plant of the Year—beating out such competitors as Streptocarpus “Harlequin Lace” (said to be the first streptocarpus with a strong perfume) and Lilium “Bethan Evans” (hardy to thirty-one degrees)—is Digitalis “Illumination Pink (1),” a jauntily speckled foxglove that is apparently irresistible to bees. “The peachy-pink flowered perennial was the overwhelming winner voted for by members of R.H.S. plant committees,” the R.H.S. states. “It was said to be impossible to breed this foxglove but Thompson & Morgan took on the challenge in 2006 and crossed Digitalis (Isoplexis) canariensis with Digitalis purpurea to achieve this exotic looking garden gem.” Another shortlisted entrant, Leucanthemum x superbum “Freak!”, has a dwarf habit, prefers part shade, and flowers repeatedly throughout the summer when it is not starring in R. Kelly videos.

There is something wonderfully Christopher Guest-ish about the Chelsea Flower Show and the terrestrial obsessions of its participants—a timeline of significant events in the show’s history, on its Wikipedia page, includes praise for J. McDonald, “the lone voice declaring the merits of ornamental grasses for his generation.” But even for people who know as little about fescues as they do about wirehaired pointers, the Flower Show yields great pleasures. There’s the delegation from Barbados, manning a rum-punch stand in front of their exhibit, which features a traditional chattel house and yard, strewn with beach glass and coconuts. The Jersey Farmer’s Union has a stained-glass window made of capiscums. The Taiwan Orchid Grower’s Association has a tree made of orchids. And the auriculas, so plasticinely perfect you think they might break into song; the daffodils, named things like “Sealing Wax” and “Cornish Chuckles,” their heads tilting in the manner of small-town gossips; the alliums like lollipops.

The people can be equally rare breeds. Intrigued by their mossy velvet cloaks, I approached a pair of men who were standing near the booth of Jacques Amand, a plant and bulb specialist from Stanmore, Middlesex.

“We are members of the Brotherhood of the Golden Sabre,” one of them, a man with glasses, said.

Le Confrérie du Sabre d’Or,” the other, a man with a mustache, added. “We are dedicated to promoting the consumption of Champagne through the art of sabrage.”

Sabrage, I was to learn, is the act of cutting of the collar of a bottle of Champagne with a sword.

“This is my breakfast one, as opposed to my lunch one,” the mustached man said, indicating a flute of 2006 Philippe Bruno.

“He sabrages every day,” his friend said. “He’s as regular as the gun at Hong Kong.”

That afternoon, they were planning to decapitate a Methuselah: “We suggest you turn the sabre round to the blunt side, because it’s got a little more wally behind it.”

Photograph by Lauren Collins.