Imagine, if you will, arriving in Britain from another planet, or even from another country, and attempting to understand, as an anthropologist might, the locals’ obsession with horticulture. Is there anywhere else in the world where the panellists of a weekly radio advice show about raising plants and vegetables – BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time – are greeted like rock stars by their live audiences? The questions posed to the experts, indeed, often seem like so much more than requests for pruning advice. What existential sadness is concealed in the soul of the person who asks about their never-flowering myrtle? What roiling passions lurk in the breast of the man who every year tries, and ever fails, to grow bigger pumpkins than his rival on the allotments? When Bob Flowerdew, Pippa Greenwood and the other, only slightly less suitably named experts dispense advice, there frequently seems to be rather more at stake than peat-free compost and slug deterrence.

The Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show, open to the public and covered on television, is another efflorescence of the British relationship with tending gardens. The event has its grandeur and pomposity and ridiculous flirtation with celebrity, but in reality, it is only like a magnificently pumped-up version of a local fete or produce show, with gold and silver-gilt medals standing in for the rosettes.

It is reassuring and charming; it is, in itself, a walled garden from which the troubles of the world are temporarily banished. Who could possibly resist Floella Benjamin’s enthusiasm for her garden celebrating the Windrush generation, the funnel of the liner rendered in Helichrysum italicum, the ocean in azure hydrangeas? One would never know that the country had been riven with scandal at how the very people it celebrates had been treated by the Home Office. Matt Keightley’s Feel Good Garden, a haven of soothing herbal aromas and silken grasses, will be donated to an NHS mental health unit after the show, where no doubt it will provide a sense of calm and delight to patients and staff. But, within the hortus conclusus, there shall be no mention of the assault on the NHS by the government. At Chelsea, one indulges the impression that all is well with the world.

Perhaps it is, after all, a human necessity to enter a garden – whether a tiny plot, an allotment, a balcony or even a pot on a windowsill – from time to time. Gardens are places of contact with soil and earth and growing things; places where the anxieties that beset us, personal and political, can temporarily be kept at bay. The gardener of the smallest urban handkerchief can take pleasure in small victories: butterflies finding a pot of lavender; a goldfinch feasting on a sunflower head. Gardens are not idylls, necessarily: gardening involves physical toil, patience and disappointment. They may be a retreat; though, as artist Ian Hamilton Finlay aphoristically put it, they may also be an attack, an act of small defiance. There is no shame in seeking a garden’s solace.