Features: From Grenada to Chelsea

The Grenada exhibit in the Great Pavilion is the culmination of a year-long labour of love. It's forged friendships between people thousands of miles apart, working towards the common goal of creating the most beautiful display this tiny tropical island can muster for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Sally Nex travelled to Grenada to meet the team and find out what goes into creating their floral feast.

Day 1: Balthazar Estate, Grenville

I'm here on the edge of what looks like a jungle with Suzanne Gaywood, born in Grenada but living in Essex, and creator of the island's annual spectacular in the Great Pavilion. Two months before Chelsea she's making one last visit to the Grenada team and looking for some eleventh-hour inspiration.

We're starting at the heart of the operation: the 32 ha (80 acre) flower farm that supplies over 1000 blooms for the Chelsea exhibit each year. Balthazar Estate's fields tower with forest-like foliage and vivid pink, red and yellow blooms dazzle amid the green above your head. It's owned by Suzanne's “main man”: Denis Noel OBE.

We're soon having trouble keeping up with the athletic 71-year-old Denis: one minute he's plucking pink bananas from a nearby Musa velutina, the next he's brandishing a bloom of Heliconia 'Golden Opal'. The unusual yellow-speckled leaves have definite Chelsea potential.

Choosing material for Chelsea is part planning, part chance: as Denis puts it, “we don't grow flowers for Chelsea – it's whatever we have when Chelsea comes.” In a final flourish, he picks out an as yet unnamed heliconia. Its elegant curve of flame red and buttery yellow has Suzanne gasping. The only issue is how to pack this rarity: if it can't survive the flight to London there's little point sending it.

Day 2: St Rose Nursery, La Mode

On the edge of the rainforest reserve over 600 metres (2000 ft) up in the mountains, St Rose is a plantsman's nursery perched on a vertiginous slope and owned by another team member, John Criswick. Born in Southend, Essex, he came to Grenada in the late 1960s and never went home. They say if you poke a stick in the ground anywhere on this island it will grow: for plantaholics like John, it's heaven.

Head gardener Derek takes us down a path plunging into a green tunnel, palms towering overhead and bamboo as thick as your arm alongside. This is the ultimate in natural gardening: John's subtle touch weaves bright-leaved ornamentals artlessly among the greenery.

We're constantly finding Chelsea treasures: head gardener Derek points out a fine tradescantia, while Suzanne spots a brightly-striped dracaena. About half of the display will be foliage: it takes Derek and six men nearly two days to collect it all. As we leave, we pass an extraordinary Sterculia mexicana tree, whose dangling pods are bright, waxy red with sandy blue seeds tucked inside. It's a favourite of Suzanne's, and for sheer wow-factor it's hard to beat.

Day 3: Dougaldston Boucan, Gouyave

In the north of the island in a clearing is the inspiration behind this year's exhibit: the boucan, or spice-drying shed, the heart of every spice estate on the island.

The great wooden building, the size of a large barn, hasn't changed in almost a hundred years. Huge drying trays spread with cocoa beans slide out on rollers to bake in the sun: they're wheeled back under if one of Grenada's tropical downpours threatens. The air is heavily scented with baskets of cloves and nutmegs are drying in the roof space. Trade isn't as good as it was, though: the 270 ha (660 acre) plantation is still recovering from Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Suzanne's Essex-based team will build the central structure of the display, and Suzanne filches a few more props – from the long knives used to harvest clove buds to an old wooden trowel. Owner John Branch is delighted to be centre of attention for Grenada's spell in the Chelsea spotlight: “It's a thrill to me,” he says. “I feel very proud as a Grenadian.”

Day 4: Bay Gardens, St George's

Just outside the capital is a real gem: four hectares (10 acres) of former sugar plantation turned forest garden. This Grenadian woodland means giant philodendrons scrambling 27 metres (90ft) up majestic royal palms and mahogany trees dripping with bromeliads and orchids. Torch gingers thrust fat, tulip-shaped buds up from bare ground to meet languid fronds of chamaedorea palms, one cascading with bead-like flowers – another must-have for Chelsea.

Owner Albert St Bernard flies to Chelsea every year with about 10 boxes of specimen foliage from his stunning collection, though, he says ruefully, “the crickets give us a hard time”. These 10cm (4”) long insects tear jagged holes in foliage - particularly galling if you're growing to Chelsea's exacting standards.

Day 5: Orchids and home

In a heady tour of the island's most cherished gardens we track down a gorgeous two-coloured Arachnis orchid on a tree stump in Fay Miller's 0.5 ha (1½ acre) hillside garden, Hyde Park, while over at Smithy's Garden, florist Ann McIntyre Campbell is saving a particularly beautiful dark red orchid for Suzanne. It's a national pastime to contribute a few choice blooms to the Chelsea display, and orchid expert and team member Cathy John collect them all together in an eleventh-hour marathon around the island.

Cathy meets us in the hotel lobby to pick up an essential delivery: Suzanne has brought 20 metres of horticultural fleece over from England. Grenada, having no winter, has no need for fleece, yet it's indispensable for protecting fragile blooms.

Packing can literally make or break Grenada's Chelsea exhibit. Every flower or leaf is assessed for its ability to withstand the 9-hour flight, and the team has developed a 'sandwich' of shredded paper and polythene to pad the delicate plant material. Even so, about 20% is lost, damaged in transit.

The team have two months before picking the final selection of orchids, heliconias, ginger lilies, and foliage before they join the boxes of spices, old tools and nutmeg shells at the airport to begin the long journey to Chelsea, where Suzanne and her team are waiting.

Judgement Day: Chelsea Flower Show

"It's just such a relief," says Suzanne, beaming from ear to ear as she proudly displays a gold medal - the team's seventh in 12 years. She's spent much of the last week up a ladder, creating arrangements on the roof of a remarkably evocative scale version of the Dougaldston boucan. The Essex team of seven friends and relatives from Suzanne's home village built it from photographs out of old pallets, whose wood already looks authentically old.

There were setbacks: the choice heliconia from Balthazar shrivelled in the chill of the plane, as did about a third of the plant material packed so carefully by the Grenada team. But what was left was of exceptional quality, and there was still plenty of it.

Cathy and Albert flew over with the flowers to join the Essex team at Chelsea, where for ten days they tirelessly unpacked flowers and helped Suzanne construct the display. The feeling of camaraderie between the team is palpable: they may live thousands of miles apart, but this is a joint achievement.

"I think we're unique," says Suzanne. "We're not a society, we're not a club, we're a non-profit organisation of interested people. It's because it's Chelsea - I don't think we'd do it for any other show, in any other part of the world. This is it, for us."