Vertical garden al Chelsea Flower Show

Chelsea Flower Show: 'vertical garden' hints at UK's gardening future

A seemingly austerity-proof show features a 15m-tall garden for an age of climate change, and £600,000 conservatori

• John Vidal
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 May 2011 17.44 BST

The B&Q vertical garden is prepared for the 2011 Chelsea Flower Show. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
The glass box stands five stories tall, can fit just two or three people at a time on each floor, and is billed as the image of a sustainable high-rise "concept garden" for an age of climate change and austerity. Yesterday the Vertical Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show was, in more ways than one, the hot ticket, with Gwyneth Paltrow and a host of lesser celebs puffing their way up the steps to admire the solar-powered water supply, the vertically growing thyme, the window boxes of strawberries, and the walls planted with chives and tomatoes. The show may be superficially about plants and people living in harmony with nature in straightened times, but signs of austerity are rarer in London SW3 than rain clouds these days. At the show, £600,000 conservatories vie with £19,000 gates, £8,700 stone lions and chicken runs and bird boxes that cost as much per square foot as most houses in south London. A simple-looking summerhouse exhibited here can cost as much as a terrace house in Middlesbrough. "No, I doubt there are many people living in high-rise blocks here," said garden designer Jules Lindy, down for the day from Norfolk and amazed by the lavishness. "But I see it like Formula One. The benefits of technology will one day trickle down to everyone." But there are hard times to be found in garden wonderland. "The recession is definitely hitting everyone, even the super-rich, but I refuse to bring my prices down," said Mike Corbett, the head of Triton UK, which sells garden ornaments ranging from assorted river gods at £1,250 to a full-scale gothic temple at £29,900. "The super-rich are much more prudent now. But there are signs of a recovery. My first client bought a temple and then came back for another. We can do doric, ionic, copper roofs, fluted columns, gold stars, anything you like. All temples are follies, really," he said. Top of the list this week for anyone with a penthouse, a large crane and roughly £500,000 to spend is a 16-metre long Irish sky garden "pod" inspired, it is said, by the floating islands of Pandora, created for James Cameron's sci-fi film Avatar. Designed by celebrity gardener Diarmuid Gavin to be suspended 80ft (25m) high above the hoi polloi, it was not working much of the day due to a breeze. "It is the first garden in the world where you cannot go for a walk and where you are very likely to be sick," said gardener James Morris. Those with a mere £70,000 to spare might like the gold-plated 3.5-metre tall ceramic Golden Cypress sculpture, covered in 23.5 carat gold. The artist, Jim Keeling, was confident of selling it to a garden lover. "It is an affirmation of the life force that exists in all matter. Each branch dances its own brief particular joy, bright with consciousness before returning to the all-nurturing dark". But if the rich were bearing up to the parched laws and relentless heat with frequent stops at the champagne bars, the plants were suffering. "We've had a long hard winter of sub-zero temperatures and a record heatwave. I thought I had seen it all," said Ricky Dorlay of Hillier Garden Centres and Nurseries, "we have experienced incredible heat and light levels this year." By consent, the most appropriate show garden exhibit was said to be the Australian Garden, brought over from Melbourne. With London having received less rainfall in May than Alice Springs, its red sand, salt sculptures, water hole and dry riverbed may just be the future of gardening in Chelsea.