Scrape the mud off your fingernails, the Chelsea Flower Show has started.
Those lucky enough to have tickets for this perennial London's social season perhaps anticipates a celebration of our national garden obsession: bursts of pink and blue petticoats, heavenly scents, the artful establishment of a verdant order amid nature's tempestuousness.
Certainly add a dash of panache – a patch of fern shade, the almost edible scent of purple wisteria, walls dripping with roses – but you also need discipline and ruthlessness. Gardeners need to get more out than they plant. We sow and till and prune, and occasionally we kill.
At this time of year my weekends, with breaks for church and the pub, consist of weeding, mowing, staking, spraying, edging and rarely sitting to admire all the handiwork.
Sophie Parmenter and Dido Milne's National Autistic Society Garden uses native plants and mosses
Don't tell the vegans, but on Saturday I carried out an ethnic cleansing, crushing dozens of red and black beetles before picking our asparagus.
Under strong instructions from the head gardener (aka wife), I continued our war of attrition with ground elder and crossgrass. You know chicken grass. The other name is sticky dick and the cleavers spread like starchy spaghetti.
Other enemies: bindweed, groundsel, hairy bittercress, creeping buttercup, marestail, nettle. They could almost be the names of parliamentary constituencies. Worst of all is Herb Robert, a geranium with notorious tendencies. The stems are smelly, red and tangled and snap easily in your hand to protect the roots. When I successfully remove a bunch of herb robert from the box hedge, I cackle like Vincent Price.
This effort will reap rewards in a week or so when the philadelphus blooms and its elusive, orange scent wafts beneath the old apple tree. Soon the string beans will take off their red Phrygian caps.
A judge speaks before an exhibition of John Peace chrysanthemums at the Chelsea Flower Show in London
The deep purple rose under our kitchen window, Souvenir du Docteur Jamain, will unravel her skirts. Stick your nose into her flowers and smell the seduction yourself.
'Once upon a time there was a dormouse who lived in a bed of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)', reads a poem by AA Milne. Delphiniums are dreamy, but I also love hollyhocks, bearded irises, sweet peas and those big alliums whose purple pompoms could be bass drum sticks.
These are some summer delicacies from our island. When someone suggests emigrating to a dusty tax haven, the only answer you need is: 'The herbaceous borders of Britain in June.'
But do the current managers of the Chelsea Flower Show understand this? Is Chelsea still representative of gardeners' dreams? Or has this once beautiful rus in urbe event fallen out of shape, its foundation bastardized by cultural leftism, corporate virtue-washing, and crazy theories of horticultural appropriation?
Looking through this year's list of entries, one is struck by the lack of color, the scarcity of straight lines and the rarity of beauty. Instead there are political views on recycling and suffering, along with the messy 'No Mow May' credo of rewilding.
Blink-savages again! Gardening is about the tension between order and disorder. What's the point of putting on your gardening gloves if you're not going to try to bend the elements to your artistic will? We all know that this can only be temporary, but the pursuit of creating beauty is certainly essential.
Chelsea seems to have forgotten this. Many of the garden designs glorify messiness. Alan Titchmarsh has done everything he can. In Country Life he has labeled Chelsea the 'Parisian catwalk' of British gardening and criticized its 'fads and fashions'.
As someone who has never forgiven Titchmarsh for the garden terrace craze created by his 1990s TV show Ground Force, I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with the little gnome. The Chelsea Flower has become anti-bucolic. Visitors can look forward to the Bridgerton Garden with 'themes such as mystery, unrest and resistance; layers of ground cover, ferns and ivy… represent a woven network of secrets'.
Alan Titchmarsh (pictured last September) presented Gardeners' World on the BBC, but he hung up his hoe in 2002
Did they plant ivy? Are they angry? That garden also has 'lichens, mosses, ferns and a number of invertebrates'. Come to Chelsea and see our snails. The Burmese Medicine Skincare Garden is full of plantains. This is 'not a hero plant in Britain', the designers admit. Indeed.
Lawn owners start growling like Doberman pinschers when they hear 'plantain'.
The Skincare Garden features 'partly destroyed stupa, overgrown and reclaimed by leaves and textures such as bark, plants, moss and lichen'. Oh good, more moss. The Microbiome Bowel Research Garden, with sprawling, edible vines, “inspires people to re-enrich their diets.”
The Junglette Garden 'promotes biodiversity with integrated bat boxes'. We once lived in a house with bats in the eaves. The smell of bat pee became unbearable. Speaking of which, Chelsea has a Freedom from Torture Garden, “a vaulted and immersive space where visitors can engage in one-on-one therapy. The communal bread oven brings survivors together to share stories and build new friendships.'
An artist's impression suggests a plot of twined willow, Mediterranean saltbush and cardoon thistles. Sit on one of those and you won't be 'sharing stories'. You curse the idiot who failed to dig it out with a trowel.
Daffodils – including the 'King Charles' – on display at press day at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show at Royal Hospital Chelsea
The National Autistic Society's garden in Chelsea appears to be a jumble of building blocks and anodised aluminium, but we are told this is a 'hypnotic kinetic sculpture, hinting at the complexity and beauty of the inner mind'.
In vegetal terms, this means that 'textured curly bark sits next to large crust blocks of expanded cork' and 'pickled pine'. In our garden at home, the only cork comes from a bottle of vino collapso and the only one pickled is me after a day of deadly battle with the brambles and the stinger.
The Pulp Friction garden – for people with learning difficulties – offers an overhead hoop made from recycled fire hoses. This would 'promote diversity, inclusion and equality'. Equality is not a virtue you easily associate with the sniffy exclusive Chelsea Flower Show.
Meanwhile, the Size of Wales Garden has a fungal fence, the No Adults Allowed Garden has 'oversized bog plants' and there are more fungi in the Tomie's Cuisine, the Nobonsai Garden, along with wild strawberries and wild carrots. We have them in our garden and they are a danger.
Oh well, I thought, at least the National Trust Garden at Chelsea will restore anyone's faith. Think again. One of the most important plants is my nemesis, Kruidrobert. Have they gone crazy? In a way, yes. It's politics. The traditional horticultural order is out of fashion because it requires effort and a certain knowledge – my wife knows the Latin names for endless plants – and is therefore hierarchical. That is contrary to egalitarianism.
And so, instead of beautiful banks of dahlias, lupines and lilies, showgoers will encounter the Chelsea Repurposed Garden, a glorified scrap yard with salvaged steel columns and concrete benches and a few drought-tolerant grasses planted in crushed concrete from demolished buildings. . It's gardening's answer to grunge. Ugliness equals equality.
Want to decorate your beds with a striped lawn? The lower middle class of you. Chelsea 2024 is virtually lawn-free. There are also surprisingly few roses. The late garden writer Christopher Lloyd stated that an unpruned clematis looked like a torn-open mattress. Margery Fish, a gardener of the 1950s, claimed that 'it is nice to take a walk in the garden and even better if you take a hoe with you'.
When we walk through the garden, most of us succumb to the urge to marvel and go dead-headed. There is something deep within us that wants to beautify and improve. Why does the Chelsea Flower Show make such a mockery of those most decent ambitions?