Four Stars at Chelsea: A Week with the Oxford Brush Company at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026

Posted from the workshop in Burford, the day after we got home.

There are very few weeks in the year when a small Cotswold brush shop finds itself parked, in full ceremony, opposite the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Last week was one of them. We loaded up the old market cart, drove the van down the M40 at an unreasonable hour, and spent five days at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show talking to gardeners. We came home with sore feet, a sunburn we hadn't planned for, and a four-star tradestand award from the RHS. Here is, more or less, how it went.

The build

People don't tend to see the build of Chelsea, which is a shame, because it's the bit where the place actually feels like a flower show. Lorries everywhere. Forklifts moving full-grown trees as if they were houseplants. The Great Pavilion at six in the morning smelling of damp turf and good coffee. We had three days to turn an empty patch of pavement into Stand 534, and we did it the way we do most things: slowly, with a lot of measuring, and a fair amount of standing back to squint.

The cart went in first. It always does. It's a proper Victorian market cart, wooden bed, iron-shod wheels, and it weighs roughly as much as a small horse. Everything else, the cabinetry, the planters, the brushes themselves, builds itself around the cart. By Sunday evening we had a small Cotswold shopfront pitched between a rose nursery and a man selling extremely expensive secateurs. By Monday morning we had geraniums in the window boxes and the kettle on in the back.

The week

Chelsea is exhausting in a way that doesn't quite make sense until you've done it. You stand for nine hours a day. You answer the same three questions roughly four hundred times each (yes, the bristles are natural; yes, the handles are pearwood; no, we don't sell online to America, though we're working on it). And somehow, by the end of every day, you've also had thirty conversations you'll remember for years.

A few favourites, from notes scribbled on the back of an order pad:

• A woman who came back on Wednesday specifically to introduce us to her husband, because, she said, "He needs to meet the people who make the broom I've been on about."
• A retired horticulturalist who picked up a beekeeper's broom, held it like a violin bow, and told us he hadn't seen one made properly since 1974.
• A small boy, maybe seven, who studied the gardener's nail brush with the seriousness of someone valuing a painting, and then announced to his father that this was what he wanted for Christmas. In May.
• A judge from the RHS who came back three times in two days. We didn't think much of it at the time.

We had the radio on quietly behind the till. We drank a great deal of tea. We sold an embarrassing number of doormats.

The award

On Tuesday afternoon, someone from the RHS quietly placed a small white card on the cart. We were busy wrapping soap for a customer and didn't notice it for a few minutes. When we did, we stopped what we were doing.

4 Star Tradestand Award Presented by The Royal Horticultural Society At RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 Awarded to The Oxford Brush Co.

For anyone who hasn't been around the trade-stand judging at Chelsea, four stars is the one before five, and five stars goes to perhaps a handful of stands in the whole show. We had been hoping for three. We had been quietly preparing the speech where we'd say "well, three is wonderful for a first proper outing." The fourth star was a surprise. The judges, when we caught them later, were kind enough to call out the cart, the planting around it, the way the soaps were arranged in little wooden trays, and, specifically, the hat brush display. We may have shed a small tear by the kettle.

The thing you forget about flower shows

The thing you forget, until you've spent a week at one, is that a flower show isn't really about flowers. It's about people who love gardens finding other people who love gardens. The conversations happen in the gaps between the displays — over coffee, in the queues, at little wooden stands like ours. A woman tells you what her father grew. A man asks if you carry anything that would have suited his grandmother's pantry. Everyone, at some point, mentions the weather.

It's a peculiarly hopeful place. The first week of June, the country at its greenest, the air smelling of cut grass and damp earth, and thousands of people walking around quietly agreeing that gardens are worth the effort. By Saturday evening, when the trolleys start coming out and people are allowed to buy the plants off the stands, the place feels less like a show and more like a very large, very polite jumble sale. We packed up the cart with two boots full of empty crates and one very battered notebook of new orders.

Coming home

We got back to Burford on Sunday evening. The shop was closed. The cat had been fed by a neighbour. The workshop floor was, somehow, already covered in catkins again. The van took an hour to unload and the kettle went on within five minutes of the front door opening.

We're still slightly stunned by all of it. Four stars from the RHS is the kind of thing that, frankly, doesn't happen to brush shops. We're aware that it doesn't happen without the people who came to find us, who bought a doormat or a nail brush, who took a card and promised to look us up, who simply stopped to say they liked the cart. So, in the proper Cotswold way, thank you.

The cart is back in its corner of the workshop. The soaps are restocked. The kettle, as ever, is on. If you'd like to come and see us, we're on the High Street in Burford, six days a week. And if Chelsea felt a bit far, we've put a small thank-you up on the website too.

With warmest thanks, Everyone at The Oxford Brush Co.

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The Oxford Brush Company, 54 High Street, Burford, Oxfordshire. Open Monday to Saturday. oxfordbrushcompany.com