Bloomin' Marvelous Business

Horse racing at ascot, rowing at Henley, tennis at Wimbledon — and the Chelsea Flower Show? Among the élite fixtures of Britain's summer calendar, gardening might seem somewhat out of place. Not to Britons. A centuries-old national passion for this pastime has ensured that the annual Royal Horticultural Society show is greeted with as much interest and social frisson as Ascot's meet for the sport of kings.

This week's four-day event, now in its 81st year at Chelsea in London, attracts Europe's social and business establishment, hours of daily TV coverage and, for the second year running, Prince Charles as a designer contributor. His herb-filled "healing garden" is up for awards, as is the perfumed "garden of transparency" created by Abu Dhabi's ruler Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, an equally passionate horticulturalist. Both take Chelsea extremely seriously: last year Charles shipped over nine tons of ceramic tiles and fountain from Spain's Granada to create a geometrical garden based on the design of his Middle Eastern carpets at Highgrove. For his entry, Sheik Zayed flew in 14 date palms, each 11-m high, in two trips from the Gulf on one of his private planes. The efforts paid off. Both won medals — but so did the inmates of Leyhill Prison, who created their "garden of Eden" with tropical and temperate food plants they had grown themselves.

Chelsea, whose 4.4-hectare space limits visitors to 155,000 (who each pay up to $40 a ticket), is a big attraction for royalty, socialites and millions of other gardening-mad Britons. It is also an important showcase for an industry with revenues of as much as $5 billion a year.

Britons spent some $1.4 billion on plants alone last year before they started in on the accompanying wellies, watering cans and weed killers, according to a November survey by Mintel market analysts. The newfound British urge to extend the house into the garden (and vice versa) helped notch up another $775 million in spending on such "enhancement" products as decking, lighting and fountains. Water features have become particularly popular, from a simple garden pond with small fountain and plastic liner, which runs to about $50, to the dramatic 80-m-long cascade, jets and fountains of a garden being created at a cost of $20 million by the Duchess of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle (which provided the exterior shots of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movie).

To discover how this hobby has bloomed in recent years, take a short trip through the British countryside. The small nurseries down muddy lanes that tucked a greenhouse or two behind a straggly hedge have everywhere morphed into acres of parking lots and shiny hangars stocking everything from compost to birthday cards and kitchenware. In Staunton, a village in western England's Gloucestershire, Lynn and Brian Lewis started selling locally grown shrubs from their field 20 years ago as a sideline to help pay the mortgage. Today they have 17 employees, a new $700,000 shop and a licensed restaurant. "People come here for a day out," says Lewis. But his operation pales beside the Wyevale Garden Centres chain. In less than five years Wyevale, headquartered at Hereford in western England, has doubled its stores from 61 to 122, and last year, helped by the acquisition of a 39-store rival, sales grew by 54% to $242 million. Since October 1998, Wyevale's shares have doubled in value.

Why is gardening flourishing? The usual mix of greater affluence, more leisure time and Britain's ever-rising house prices, which make property-improvement especially worthwhile. The media have also played their usual role of feeding the trend and feeding off it. Gardening sections in weekend newspapers — "buying a wheelbarrow can be trickier than you might imagine" — keep proliferating on top of the 1.3 million gardening magazines sold every month. But it's the slew of TV gardening programs that have really fertilized the market. A Mintel survey in July last year found that 29% of the 2,027 adults polled used ideas for garden designs or plants they had seen on TV. Indeed, some gardening presenters have become national celebrities, with star billing going to the BBC's cheery and buxom Charlie Dimmock of Ground Force, whose patio laying and pond digging in trademark bra-less T shirt regularly mesmerizes the nation.

The industry loves makeover programs like Ground Force too. Whenever a TV team descends on a modest backyard and transforms it into a vision of minimalist stone paving and dramatic Australian tree ferns, sales of stone slabs and Dicksonia antarctica rocket the following weekend. Britain is now such a major market for this slow-growing fern that Stuart Chapman of the World Wide Fund for Nature is alarmed. "We have serious concerns," he says, "that after years of non-stop TV promotion in the U.K., the demand is causing irreparable damage to Australian temperate rain forests."

Gardening's popular appeal is causing some dismay among horticulture snobs, of which Britain has plenty. The history of gardens, notes Charles Quest-Ritson in The English Garden: A Social History, "is all about social aspirations, lifestyle, money and class." Garden gnomes of course have never been acceptable — they are banned at Chelsea despite complaints from gnome action groups — but the choice of flowers and colors also is seen as denoting social refinement, or lack thereof. White flowers, as in the famous garden created by writer Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst Castle, are good; easy-to-grow, cheerful orange marigolds or red salvias are dismissed as too suburban.

They are, after all, readily available at garden centers. Real gardeners, maintains feminist author Germaine Greer, buy plants from other "plantsmen" or nurserymen, not from warehouses where the salespeople may know little about the plants they sell. Even Mintel distinguishes between "passive gardeners," who will spend freely for easy and instant results, and the real thing.

The garden centers couldn't care less whether their customers are passive or passionate as long as they keep spending. And with property prices continuing their upward ratchet and the population of retired people — an important gardening demographic — similarly rising, it will be a long time before the bloom is off this business rose.