A poster of Wimbledon depicts spectators sitting among flowerbeds in a garden instead of seats as they watch the action on Centre Court. It is an artist’s impression of course, but also reflects the reality of flowers and wall gardens being seemingly everywhere at Wimbledon. Inevitably, the preening green grass courts, the pristine white sportswear of the players, and the absence of advertising billboards stand out against other Grand Slam events. But the grounds of Wimbledon, uniquely for a large sporting event, have an abundance of flowers in a colour palette of white, purple, mauve and green. In their paradoxical orderly profusion, the displays seem to be the handiwork of an impressionist painter.
The main clubhouse, for instance, from whose balconies the new champions this weekend will show off their trophies after the presentation ceremonies, has window boxes of bright purple and white petunias. The building itself is covered in Boston ivy, which serves as a fine backdrop for busts of former women champions from Britain. Like a giant version of a Mughal painting, the building’s front is framed at its base by vividly purple lobelia, bulbous heads of mauve allium and other English flowers. Flowers that look like lavender add an accent to the green, while perfectly sculpted bushes of pittosporum complete the picture. (Purple is such a mainstay of the Wimbledon colours that the club’s chief executive, Sally Bolton, met the press this week in a striking purple suit).
The All-England Club likes to describe Wimbledon as a tennis championship amid an English garden. Its team of 12 full-time gardeners and an additional 13 gardeners who work from April to October pull off this optical illusion by using English perennials visible in window boxes and small home gardens across the country and creating works of art dotted across the 42-acre club grounds. Seating areas near the food outlets have roses growing overhead to provide a canopy of shade. In the broadcast centre, amid the open-air booths for player interviews, a profusion of pink hydrangea jostle to catch your eye alongside the superstars of tennis and the backdrop of green courts, which, for tennis fans, outdo the paddy fields of Kerala or Bali for serene natural beauty.
The “garden” of Wimbledon is equal parts inspiration and perspiration. Weeks before the tournament begins, 28,000 plants are brought in to complement the all-year flowers and plants at the club. After the tournament starts, the team of gardeners who attend to the flowers comes in at 6am to water and prune the plants every day before the gates open at 10am.
On Monday morning, before the more than 40,000 daily spectators surged into the grounds, the gardeners were busy tidying up around the clubhouse, where the ivy has been growing especially fast because of daily temperatures in excess of 30 degrees Celsius. Even as a loud shout went up from ball boys and ball girls after Rufus, the Wimbledon pet hawk who guards the site against pigeons, landed on their outstretched hands instead of flying under what was intended as a ceremonial arch for the hawk, the gardeners kept clipping and pruning without even glancing at the commotion.
At the centre of this effort is head gardener Martyn Falconer, whose master’s thesis, written a decade ago, was dedicated to understanding how to make an English garden in the midst of a world-class tennis championship. Speaking of the need to frequently restrain the runaway growth of the ivy on the clubhouse walls spurred by the increasingly hot, dry summers that Europe has experienced of late, he says that the ivy creepers around the windows of the clubhouse and the large Rolex clock on its wall needs to be clipped every few days. “There is a precision to the structure,” says Falconer.
That amounts to a mission statement for both the care of the flowers around the club as well as its fabled tennis courts. The hardness of the courts is checked more than 18,000 times during the tournament fortnight, while the ball bounce height is checked more than 1,800 times. Although the tennis courts are managed by a separate team, a gardener’s work on the courts and amid the flower boxes is never ending during the fortnight. Falconer says that he rarely gets to watch the tennis during the tournament, although that may also be because he is primarily a football fan.
Less precise but ever more frequent are extreme weather events that complicate looking after the flowers. This year, a week or so before the championships began, parts of London were hit by torrential downpours; water flooded the press area at Wimbledon.
The longer-term challenge, which seems ever more urgent after consecutive unseasonably hot dry summers in England, is to make the selection of plants and flowers at Wimbledon more resilient. This is the subject of a master’s thesis being currently researched by a senior member of Falconer’s team, Robin Murphy. Many of the buildings' cladding in ivy cools them. Falconer says that hydrangea, which requires a lot of water for instance, may need to be reconsidered.
The championships will turn 150 next year and seem set to dominate the tennis world’s imagination for years to come. But the impressionist masterpiece that is one of the country’s most unusual English gardens will likely take on more tropical aspects as it adapts.
Rahul Jacob is a Mint columnist and has covered Wimbledon for two decades for the Financial Times, London, and for Mint.