This year’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Chelsea Flower Show will be held virtually for the first time after it was cancelled due to the Covid-19 virus crisis.

The world famous event has taken place at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, in London, every year since 1913, apart from during World War I and World War II.

It was called off in March due to the lockdown but the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) will host free content including garden tours on its website.

The charity said that it hoped that it would “inspire more people to get growing”.

Celebrity gardener, Alan Titchmarch MBE DL, HonFSE, has been down that particular road after he shared a virtual tour of his private garden, at his family home in Hampshire.

To mark fifty years in gardening, forty years in broadcasting and seventy years of himself – on this planet Earth – the gardening journalist, poet, TV presenter and novelist took the opportunity to do so as he lends his on-going support for the National Garden Scheme’s campaign to keep its garden gates ‘virtually’ open and to continue raising funds for virtual nurseries and health charities during the Covid-19 crisis

“Whatever is going on in the world”, he said, “every spring is a new beginning, a chance for gardens to start anew, to realize just how important the garden is as a way of expressing ourselves artistically and a way of keeping in touch with nature – the one constant in an ever-changing and often frightening world.

“Our gardens are the ultimate reality – created by man with the help of nature they offer us an anchor in time of turmoil, never more so than now”.

The face of gardening in the UK, he was the lead presenter of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for BBC television for 30 years – from 1983 to 2013, as well as Gardeners’ World and, along with Charlie Dimmock and Tommy Walsh, fronted Ground Force.

One of the abiding memories for him and them would be when they did a make-over of the late Nelson Mandela’s garden.

Keen to see parks in the UK open and garden centres reopen, he said: “I is totally heartbreakingly sad to see an industry that is being brought to its knees with the perishability and seasonality of plants means that an estimated £200 million of seasonal plants will have to be scrapped.

“To be able to get out gardening and growing things is a massive part of our physical and mental health and well-being”.

This year’s ‘virtual’ RHS Chelsea Flower Show is on from May 18 to 23.
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