Chelsea Flower Show 2017: drugs, MI5 and a Brexit bromance behind the scenes

But, despite all our planning, we didn’t anticipate a visit from HM Border Force officers a couple of weeks before the show. Pete had spent the previous 12 months nurturing plants in different nurseries across France and Spain. Because Andy’s plant palette was Mediterranean and dry, Pete felt (correctly, given the cold start to the year), that it would be better to grow most of the plants in a warmer climate. A good plan - even a excellent plan, had it not been for the customs officer who decided that our truck arriving into the UK was full of narcotics rather than plants. Unable to inspect all the pallets easily, he clambered over the plants, breaking and damaging many prize specimens that we had lovingly nurtured.

It seems to happen each year. Maybe it just goes with building gardens at Chelsea. But the one common theme is that you end up meeting an incredibly diverse group of people. One year, working with Dan Pearson on the Laurent-Perrier garden, we ran into a serious problem when we discovered an enormous sewer directly beneath our plot. I spent many tense but ultimately happy hours with people from Thames Water and, as a result, feel that I am quite an authority on Victorian sewers in Central London.

A few years before that, we were even interviewed by two very serious individuals who must have been from MI5, although they didn’t say as much. We were building a garden for Tom Stuart-Smith using large panels of Corten steel. These were manufactured in Wiltshire and, in order for them achieve the perfect rusty patina, they had been left outside in the factory’s locked compound. One weekend three weeks before the show, some kids broke into the factory and used our wonderful panels as a racing track for their BMX bikes, ruining the carefully created finish.

We went into panic stations mode and soon discovered that hydrochloric acid was the quickest and easiest way to clean the panels and start the rusting process all over again. But it’s very difficult to find. My attempt to persuade my then-wife, a teacher, to steal some from the Science lab, went down badly. But I did eventually find some on the internet and thought no more about it.

Several months later, two suited gentleman arrived at the Crocus office. They wanted to know why we had bought one of the constituent parts for making a bomb. It took a while to persuade them that I was innocent – they even closed down our website for a while – but I took some comfort from the fact that they were pursuing this line of enquiry. 

Another mortifying moment came when I was invited to Highgrove to meet HRH The Prince of Wales to discuss a garden designed by Jinny Blom. Like all good boys, I rang my mother to say I was off to meet the Prince, expecting a barrage of congratulations and questions. What I got was: “Darling, you must make sure you polish your shoes.” So I polished my shoes not once but twice that night.

When I arrived at Highgrove a policeman asked me to get out of the car. It was at the height of the BSE crisis and he told me to dunk my shoes in a bucket of disinfectant… I looked at him in disbelief. But he won that battle and 30 minutes later I was sitting in front of the Prince of Wales with a really horrid dirty watermark around my shoes.

Every year, about a week or two before we finish Chelsea, Pete Clay and I have our annual tiff. It happens like this. He takes me on a detailed tour of the Crocus nursery to see the plants and to discuss what has worked, what hasn’t. And every year it’s the same. The maths are quite simple. A Chelsea garden is 20m by 10m, or 200m2. Assuming you plant about half the garden, you need enough plants for 100m2. Assuming 20 plants per m2, you need 2,000 plants, which is what I budget for.

But Pete is a plant junkie and can’t help himself. An hour into the tour we have covered three big polytunnels and there are another four to go. I estimate that we have enough plants for at least four show gardens. The budget is blown yet again. I ask him why we have to have so many plants – and he just smiles. He’s never happier than when surrounded by his babies.

This year we have been working with designer James Basson on the M&G garden. His design is based on the magnificent limestone quarries of Gozo and plants endemic to Malta. Wild species such as Tetraclinis articulata and Hypericum aegypticum have taken us well outside our comfort zone, so Pete is having to learn a whole new flora. 

His cunning plan was to get one of our friendly Spanish nurseries to grow on some of these plants. The English climate makes it very hard to overwinter them, so it seemed like a good idea. Pete was particularly fixated by Euphorbia dendroides, which he tried to grow last year for Andy Sturgeon. The plan failed last year because the nursery over-watered them and they dropped all their leaves.

But, like Scrat, the acorn-obsessed saber-toothed squirrel in Ice Age, Pete is equally obsessed with the euphorbia. All was going well until a strong wind blew over all the plants last month. Keen to prevent this happening again, the nursery decided to cut them all back. The resulting twiggy stumps are now unusable for Chelsea. So, once again, Euphorbia dendroides will be staying in Spain and not coming to Chelsea. Pete is very upset. 

James’s design is one of the most challenging we have ever built at Chelsea but it’s going to be magnificent. It involves building two enormous pillars, the largest of which is 9m high. We are working with wonderful stonemasons from Halmann Vella in Malta. Bucking the Brexit trend, English, Scottish, French and Maltese are all working well on site. Most of them don’t speak any English and we certainly don’t speak any Maltese but everyone is loving it. 

There is even a kind of bromance breaking out. The French engineer, Bruno, works closely with our engineer, Simon. One afternoon Bruno came up to me and said, almost with a tear in his eye: “Simon is magnificent. He’s working to a millimetre – it’s so wonderful...” 

With only a week to go now, what can possibly go wrong?