Irish Examiner View: Chelsea carnival will be virtual

The scene at the 2019 Chelsea Flower Show.

As plague years went, 1625 was, for the people of London, pretty much run of the mill. Fewer than 42,000 of them died. Forty years later, when London’s Great Plague peaked an estimated 100,000 people — then almost a quarter of the city’s population — died in 18 months.

London’s population today is just shy of 9m. Do the maths and be consoled.

Francis Bacon, in his Essays published in 1625, wrote: “If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” That phrase is invoked more often than Bacon could have imagined but it will be given a new meaning, certainly a new context, in the coming weeks.

The Chelsea Flower Show, one of the great celebrations of modern European culture, has been coronavirus curtailed but it will proceed online in what will be the Royal Horticultural Society’s first virtual Chelsea show.

Now gardening enthusiasts, be they the mountain or Muhammad, can enjoy the show in all its colourful, inspiring splendour — an advance that would have baffled Bacon but it is one brought to us by the pandemic.