It’s only when you discover how much you don’t know, that you are on the path to knowing anything at all. I am a Chelsea Flower Show virgin, having always considered it somewhere up there with Royal Ascot and a Buckingham Palace garden party in the list of things I definitely didn’t want to do.

But a friend’s 40th birthday and a man called Bob Benton intervened with generous tickets to the Monday night charity evening and so I found myself, glass of champagne in hand, strolling through the gardens of this rather odd British institution; all those hours, sometimes years, of horticultural effort packed into such a small space and for such a brief period. Even before a jaunty brass band struck up, I felt like I was wandering through a Richard Curtis movie: most of the visitors seemed more interested in gossip than gardens.

People better qualified than I will have told you about those gardens; to a beginner’s eye they looked rather too much purple and yellow and an awful lot of nepeta, but I did find, to my astonishment, that I could just about understand the work involved in some of them. To get all those things flowering together and perfected simultaneously… and to transplant them into this cramped bit of Chelsea for a week, well it’s a pretty odd business but I could appreciate the effort. Which is my point about beginning to understand how little you know – two years ago I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what the Royal Horticultural Society even was. Or nepeta.

Somehow, organically, when you pick up a spade, you start to learn.

Vegetables were pretty thin on the ground, it being a flower show, but I did meet Jonathan Smith (from AW Gardening Services) who had some far too early but very pretty runner beans (having only just planted our seeds, it seemed a bit offensive that he had a 4ft plant already) but, more interestingly, a white carrot. He told me that carrots are naturally purple and white: the Dutch turned them orange in the 16th century in a fit of patriotism. Funny thing to get patriotic about, a carrot.

The stupidest and least attractive garden, I thought, was a mad concretey thing supposedly representing an astronaut's 600 days on Mars. It seemed quite pointless. It won Best in Show. That’s ok because, like I say, discovering you don’t know anything much is the beginning of knowledge.

Explore Gardens

• Chelsea Flower Show

• Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

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