Garden Centre
Friday, June 1, 2007
Chelsea!
I can finally sort out my thoughts. I don’t know what Chelsea means to you (‘blue is the colour, football is the game’, quite possibly) but to me, and a lot of other gardeners, it means the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show. It’s the biggest annual bean-feast, competitive gardening event and all round jolly in the UK gardening world, but it’s also a superb venue for picking up new ideas, for exploring trends and for ear-wigging bitchy gossip.
If, like me, you’re there on a journalist ticket, you get – if you’re lucky – one day to tour all the gardens and make notes on everything you see, and that means ending up with something very much like vegetative indigestion. There’s so much to see, so much to smell (not a huge amount to touch, sadly, it’s rather a hands-off show for obvious reasons), so much colour, texture, space, light, the sound of a thousand water features sends you running to the loo where the queues are longer than those for strawberries and cream at Wimbledon ….
Okay, back to the point. Once again the judges - that formidable bunch of horticulturalists - handed out a plethora of awards. Did I agree with them? Sometimes. I thought the National Linnaeus Tercentenary Committee garden (what a mouthful) was gorgeous and well-designed, but the Fortnum and Mason's one was just a bit tacky; too focused on ‘themes’ and not enough on plants – and their shell grotto arches were, frankly, naff.
My favourite garden: The CAF Giving Garden; Where the Wild Things Are - didn’t place at all, which is utterly bizarre to me. Based on the book by Sendak which many of us read as children or to our children, it was a lovely, imaginative and thoughtful planting; perhaps not entirely pulled off visually but really beautifully worked through – the bed of the little boy was covered in camomile, lavender and passiflora, which all encourage sleep and then there were exciting ‘dream’ plants like banana, giant elephants ear, flowering rhubarb, artichoke and angelica which indicated the ‘wild things’ that the little boy encounters. It would have got gold from me!
And once again the BBC Peoples’ Award went to a classic garden, as opposed to the somewhat avant garde ones that won the formal judging. The Old Gate, designed by Adam Woolcott and Jonathan Smith is based on a 1930s and ‘40s theme which the judge’s seem to have overlooked. It just goes to show, you can’t please everybody.
Labels: chelsea flower show, garden secrets, plants
The All Seasons Gardener at 9:03 AM
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4 Comments:
Have always enjoyed watching the Chelsea Flower show highlights program that screens in New Zealand about six months after the event (or same week if a Kiwi exhibit wins a gold or silver. I think last year there was a gold).
Which is just a cheeky way of getting to my next question ;)
Can I compost tea bags? They seem to be our biggest food refuse item.
Mark Hubbard
Yes, not only can you - you should! The things that it' a great idea to compost are:
Fruit and vegetables and waste from these like roots and peelings, flowers and leaves, coffee grounds, egg shells (crush them first), grass, soft cuttings and prunings, small twigs, prunings and cuttings and tissues, kitchen towels, newspaper once they've been torn or shredded and mixed into the bulk of the compost - if paper is allowed to form a solid layer it can result in the compost not breaking down properly. I'd tear tea bags open before composting and empty coffee grounds out of their filter paper to distribute them through the heap better.
I would avoid composting all meat and fish, dairy and pastry products and anything containing sugar, just because they draw pests and cause flies to lay eggs, also don't compost anything made of plastic, perennial weeds like dandelions, ground elder etc (I include buttercups which are pestilential in my garden for some reason) and any diseased plant or plant material.
You can use compost accelerator to get things started, and to keep them going, turn your compost with a fork regularly, water lightly if it gets dry, and enjoy ...
You can use compost accelerator to get things started, and to keep them going, turn your compost with a fork regularly, water lightly if it gets dry, and enjoy ...
Thanks for the lists. I'd started composting meat but was wondering about the wisdom of it (though mainly from the point of view I suspect it takes a long time to break down, but yes, don't need more flies).
This notion of forking the compost is good, but I'm wondering if I've gone, therefore, with the right kind of bins. I've bought those big black plastic bins (I'm sure it's the same world over): they're going to be awfully hard to fork over contents as will involve getting through the undecomposed top layer each time.
Wishing I got a big one I say with a handle that you could simply turn.
Mark Hubbard
Yeah, those bins are not ideal, I'm afraid. You can always try either buying a long-handled hoe and turning the contents with that, or half filling each bin, then turning the contents of one bin into the other so you end up with one full bin and after a couple of weeks moving the stuff back to the first bin - that would work, I reckon.
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