The black gardeners who fought for King and Country in the First World War are the inspiration for ‘The Gardeners Have All Gone’, Pennard Plants’ 2014 Chelsea Flower Show exhibit, which is being presented together with London education and environment charity Roots and Shoots.
This year’s garden takes the theme of the 1914 anniversary of WW1 but with a different angle. It focuses on some of the Great War’s lesser known troops: the black soldiers, from this country and Empire, many of whom found themselves thousands of miles from their homes in the colonies in the trenches of France.
It tells two different stories. On one side is a pristine Edwardian vegetable garden, tended to perfection, not a carrot or leek out of place. On the other, the old wild order has returned since the gardeners left for the Front. Black poppies, Solomon’s seal, bluebells, cowslips, primroses, cow parsley and foxgloves have taken over. Potatoes have gone to flower and onions and chives to seed. Brambles scramble everywhere. It’s still beautiful but Nature has taken the garden back.
Roots and Shoots students are making a short film to be shown in flickering newsreel sepia in the potting shed on the Chelsea garden. It will tell how the gardeners at the ‘Big House’ swapped their spades and rakes for rifles and bayonets, donned the khaki uniform, learned to march and fight and then sailed for France. Many of this year’s students have an Afro Caribbean heritage and will take the parts of the gardeners-turned-soldiers, while the household staff left behind will be played by Roots and Shoots’ young female trainees.
“Many people will be surprised to know of the black troops who fought for our country in the Great War,” says Roots and Shoots Director Linda Phillips.
The Gardeners Have All Gone by Pennard Plants, in association with Roots and Shoots, will be in the Grand Pavilion at RHS Chelsea 2014.
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