Flowers 'n' the rain

Readers of RadioFar-far could be forgiven for thinking I've posted to my wrong blog today; 'Flowers in the Rain' by The Move was the first ever record played on BBC Radio One early on a Saturday morning back in September 1967. No mistake though: this week it could well also have been the theme song for the famous Chelsea Flower Show during what's now being described as "the wettest drought on record". To say May has been moist would be an under-statement.

It could only happen in Britain, couldn't it. We're renowned throughout the world for our love of gardens as much as our dependability in talking about our undependable weather. The combination of these two elements made for a classic Chelsea this year, as right on cue the heavens delivered a deluge for much of the six days of this start to the annual social season in the UK. Even HM the Queen, making her traditional visit with other members of the royal Family on Monday, decided that a headscarf was better than a soggy royal coiff as she toured the showground and admired the awesome achievements of dedicated amateur and professional gardeners from all over the world.

I've only managed a trip to Chelsea once, one evening in the early eighties. Understandably, tickets sell out weeks in advance so thank heavens for the BBC's excellent coverage,anchored by Alan Titchmarsh who himself has become something of a national treasure and a best-selling author to boot. It's only a pity the technical bods have yet to find a way to transmit smells across the airwaves, then we could really enjoy Chelsea in all its glory from an armchair.

Rain too is punctuating the last Bank Holiday of the Spring in what was traditionally known as "Whitsun Week" when the holiday always coincided with Pentecost before it was set for the last weekend in May regardless of religious timings. Yesterday afternoon, I went with my brother to enjoy the Brentford Waterside Festival, except most of the water seemed to be coming from the sky rather than the Grand Union Canal and the River Brent at this historic point where both enter Britain's longest river and, in legend if not in proven fact, Julius Caesar crossed the Thames.

Being British means stiffening your upper lip not with starch but with stoicism whatever the weather. That was evident from everybody at Chelsea this year and it was just as present in the hardy souls who braved the rain to enjoy the Waterside festival. This was once a bustling docks, where all manner of cargoes were transferred from the watery way to the permanent way of Brunel's Great Western Railway, and vice versa.

The steam trains and the horses which once pulled the barges have long gone, but the views of flora and even fauna along the towpath here can be as delightful as anything found in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. Barges painted in colourful floral liveries vie with the wild flowers of the towpath for visitors' attention, and are all the more enjoyable when viewed from on board one of these lovely vessels. I was delighted to take a short ride aboard the "Pisces", one of the craft of the Hillingdon Narrowboats Association along with my brother who knows these vessels well and has a certificate in the delicate art of steering and turning them- no mean feet given that they are up to 72 feet/24 metres long!

For all that the weather has disappointed this week, it's ended with a great appreciation of the English spring in all its variety and colour. The great English landscape painter J M W Turner spent his early years in Brentford, commemorated in one of the town's hostelries, but even he could never have captured the scenes of natural wonder on hilltop or water's edge, as finely as God does in leaf and petal, stem and branch.

Britain has so much to offer the lover of greenery and scenery in it's watery reflections and garden paths, but as Rudyard Kipling put it "the glory of the garden lies in more than meets the eye". Or rather, as Jesus himself put it, "even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these".