Haughtyculture

You get off the bus where Lower Sloane Street meets Royal Hospital Road. Immediately, your eardrums reverberate with the unselfconscious braying of people who are fully comfortable in their surroundings. They are laughing and wearing sensible footwear. You walk into the grounds of Chelsea Hospital and hand over your ticket. Stretching far in front of you is a wide tree-lined avenue, with rows of temporary shops set up on each side. On the tarmac between the shops is a thrusting river of rich people. They stream forward, collecting items in their wake like driftwood: paintings of flowers, paintings of fruit, secateurs, hanging baskets, ergonomic foam kneelers, candles, bunches of lavender, Hunter wellingtons, socks for Hunter wellingtons, seeds, watering systems, commemorative mugs, commermorative trays, commemorative aprons, state-of-the-art garden furniture and Pimm's.

To the west of this heaving flow of consumption is the main event: a vast marquee surrounded by outdoor exhibits. The show gardens are each about the size of a tennis court and apparently cost around £250,000 to put together. The winning one is sponsored by The Daily Telegraph. It is rubbish. Well, what you can see of it is rubbish. It is impossible to get too close as the posh rich flower-lovers who look at displays are slightly more burly and aggressive than the posh rich flower-lovers who like to shop. They get to the front, where there is a rope, and they stand and take photos and chat to the design team about concepts. But they do not move on. It is not like being in a crowded gallery, where people are aware that others are trying to see and so adopt a conveyor-belty shuffle. At Chelsea, once you are in your patch, you stand there, by the rope. Perhaps they are waiting for Blur to do a quick set, although this is unlikely in The Telegraph garden as there is no room to swing a labrador. It is full of weird rusty metal sculptures, water features, cacti, bad furniture and wildflowers. It looks like a child has gone into Homebase, picked up one of everything, and then told her autistic next door neighbour to organise them all. It is incoherent and thus unrelaxing. This sense of pressure is augmented by the volume of be-wheelchaired elderly women. There are hundreds of them, their heads lolling, their knees under blankets, brought out for the day, pushed by upbeat Australian carers. You wonder whether this is what this is what your life will be like in sixty years.

The best garden is made by a man called Tom Stuart-Smith. In his photo he is wearing a brown corduroy blazer, a white shirt, and a navy blue jumper. He did not go to school at a comprehensive in Blackpool. He has won a gold medal every time he's exhibited at Chelsea. He is clearly a Very Good Gardener. There are a lot of wild flowers, things that look like cow parsley, mixed in with more angular urban shapes. It's a nice mixture - but there's not so much variety that it becomes hectic. The colours are mainly green, purple, yellow and white. There are some bulbous hedges on the right hand side that are a bit out of place, and some more rusty metal, which is clearly very in at the moment. It's good. There are some invited guests wafting around among the show gardens, quaffing champagne out of real glasses and acting as if this is their actual land. It is annoying on several levels.

The crappest garden is the most expensive one, worth £19 million. It is called The Ace of Diamonds. It is not loads of really expensive plants, as you might expect. It is loads of really mediocre plants, surrounded by white gravel. Strewn in the white gravel are huge gems the size of bisected tennis balls - sparkling blue sapphires and fat emeralds. It looks like someone nicked the Queen's jewellery box and tripped over while escaping through SW3. It is impossible to overstate what a waste of £19 million it is. There are nineteen million better ways to spend that money. You move on, huffing lightly.

The marquee in the middle is full of people who spend their ENTIRE LIVES thinking about plants and flowers. It is a strange experience, like suddenly stumbling across a collection of people who think that collecting different types of staple is a perfectly normal activity. There are amazingly straight lupins - lupins are gross, naff, phallic flowers, but getting them to be straight is apparently a task worthy of someone's time - and carrots that start out normal at the top but have really, really, really long thin ends, as if they're made out of plasticene and someone's got a bit carried away stretching them. There are some gorgeous bonsai trees but the organisers haven't positioned them very sensitively as it is impossible to set up that hilarious photo where you stand behind one and it makes you look like a giant. There are some roses but they don't smell much these days as the new breeds are apparently less diseased but less scented as a consequence.

Around the edge there are more displays - courtyard gardens where the Green & Black's sponsored one is jungle themed. They had a special jungle inhabitant shipped over specially to advise on the correct architecture of a hut made of banana leaves. It is gross. Not the hut. The 'let's bring over a native' yuckness.

And then there are the marquees filled with people drinking more champagne and more Pimm's. It is now nearly 8pm and you are staring enviously at their booze but cannot justify spending £9.50 on your own glass. Eventually you find yourself flagging and leave the grounds. It is good to have seen what all the fuss is about but you don't think you belong in that crowd. And for that you are grateful. As you read your book about South Africa the next morning, you are sickened by the account of a teenage girl's rape. Some people grow poker straight lupins and others rape children. Others sit at a desk and do nothing of note. You put your head in your hands.