Hautie Culture: Flowers and fashion

As Gucci scoops a silver medal at Chelsea Flower Show, we dig into the fertile relationship between fashion and gardening

BY Lisa Armstrong | 21 May 2014

While Mary Berry, Monty Don, Benedict Cumberbatch and other cosy BBC treasures communed with delphiniums, peonies and swivelling TV cameras at the opening of the Chelsea Flower Show on Monday, the stylist Lady Mary Charteris - she of the sheer-fronted Pam Hogg wedding dress - picked her way daintily past the rustic trugs and rust-proof gazebos to the Gucci garden: a reminder that you don't have to look like Alan Titchmarsh to be seduced by a ravishing garden.

Gucci is not the first fashion house to dust off its trowel for Chelsea. Chanel and Dior have both ploughed allotments there. This is not mere marketing whimsy. Coco Chanel and Christian Dior genuinely adored, if not getting their hands dirty, then supervising their gardeners to do so on their behalf. Both created gardens of lasting loveliness - daisies, mimosa, iris and 350 olive trees for her; roses and lily of the valley for him, as attested by the book Dior Impressions . Roses remain a recurring theme in Dior's collections today under creative director Raf Simons, whose first collection for the house in 2012 took place in a classically Parisian enfilade of rooms in which each wall was smothered in either carnations, delphiniums, goldenrod or roses.

Gardening clearly computes with the fashion sensibility. The milliner Philip Treacy begins every weekend at his Cotswolds cottage with a trip to the local garden centre. "Nature is the only perfection in the world," he says. Dries Van Noten, the Belgian designer adored for his easy-to-wear, timeless, often embellished clothes, has created a garden 20 miles from Antwerp which, he says, "puts everything into perspective. You can't say to your garden, 'I'm sorry, I can't weed today because I have to launch a collection.' You have to make time for it."

Dior Couture autumn/winter 2010 PHOTO: JASON LLOYD-EVANS

Perhaps all designers should be issued with gardens as a refuge for wrung-out creative minds. Hardy Amies - who once, to my delight, escorted me around his own idyllic Cotswold gardens - observed that "if more people got to experience the profound pleasure of cultivating roses, there would be fewer wars".

Yves Saint Laurent also found much-needed solace tinkering in his garden in Marrakesh. Originally created by the French painter Jacques Majorelle from a palm grove, it was filled with yuccas, jasmine and bougainvillea, all offset by searing cobalt blue (or Majorelle-bleu, as it's officially known) walls and yellow railings. After Saint Laurent restored it, it unleashed a trend for snazzy backwashes and prickly cactii in suburban gardens from North Africa to Watford. As aesthetes, fashion designers can affect decorative trends in horticulture as well as haute couture.

Failing an actual garden, there are always pictures. Flowers are one of the most popular posts on Instagram. Sam McKnight, the master-cultivator of prize-worthy hair for everyone from the late Diana, Princess of Wales to Chanel is one of the social media site's most prolific contributors of woozily seductive blooms, many of the snaps taken in his north London garden. "My interest just crept up on me," he told Vogue in 2012. "I suppose it's called being middle-aged gardening has made me a calmer, more tolerant person. I'm learning that it takes control to achieve that chaotic look - just as with hair."

Besides being therapeutic, gardens fertilise the imagination. "The garden allows me to see blends of colours and materials," Christian Louboutin wrote in his eponymous book, of the grounds around his 13thcentury chteau in the Vende. "It's highly instructive."

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Hautie Culture: Flowers and fashion