Garden Blogs

Tuesday, 21 July 2009

And so we reach the end

Sunday 12th July arrived and it was the last day of the show. It's always sad to take a show garden apart, but I've been doing it since the late eighties and have come to terms with it over the years. What is always gratifying is the pleasure and appreciation people show when they meet you on the garden, and this was certainly the case with both Rachel's Gardens this year. It's lovely just standing back and listening to people talking about the gardens. Great to see how it gives them ideas and ambitions. Also you get a number of people who particularly pick out your garden as the one that has plants in it thst they want to bag when “sell off” comes at 4:30pm - and there is no denying them! Up to that point the RHS require you to keep a show garden in prime condition, but as the hooter goes people dive in looking for bargains! Although visitors to the show can buy plants from trade stands all day long, they get this single hour to buy plants from the show gardens before security move in and the public are moved out and big lorries roll in to begin the removal of all the exhibitors goods. As a result the “damage” is done really quickly and you suddenly look around you to find there is no longer a show garden, just a shell. The Rachel's events team were also clearing out their fridges with great bargains to be had as the electricity soon gets cut off as the show ends. The RHS give you a deadline of 4 days to leave the plot spotless, so the pressure is quickly on to get on with the breakdown. I only needed one skip for waste. Most of the materials were reusable or hired. The remaining plants that were on hire went back to their respective Nurseries. It was a shame that the gardens had nowhere to be rebuilt but, as we knew this was the case, we had planned to waste as little as possible. The removal of the black and white gravel pathways proved the most laborious job, but we managed to separate the two colours into individual 1 tonne bags with only 3 bags having to be mixed. I was really pleased to find that it was easy to remove the sleeper wall in “Passion for Taste” as we had not used concrete, but instead 'watered-in' layers of topsoil which had set the sentinels hard in the trench. I had been afraid of using this method as if they came loose during the show it would have been embarrassing – but it worked fine and I will use this method again. So all that now remains of “Passion for Taste” and “Stylish by Nature” are our memories and photographs. My thanks go out to everyone in all the various teams that made the build up smooth and such a pleasure, well done all of you!

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Rachel's Garden Parties

What a fantastic show - there are 30,000 people a day looking at our gardens! Chris and her Rachel's events team are submerged with people queing up for samples and cool bags of delicious yogurt and all the other goodies! For me, it's a strange time as I hand over my garden to others after the judging and press day razamatazz. Only they are not all strangers. My son James (21) is in charge of the maintenance of the gardens during the show period and it's great to see him and nice to know the gardens are in good safe hands. He will mostly be watering, deadheading flowers and fruit, answering questions about the plants and, of course, scaring off those pigeons! After 12 12hr days, I need to get home for a break from the Show although, of course, there is my regular garden business to catch up on so it's not exactly a holiday (but it's nice to be back in my own bed for a few days!) And, of course I get a chance to tuck into some of the contents of the Rachel's coolbag we took away with us - rice pudding - yummmy! After the awards were given out, Rachels threw a lovely little party on the stand. If anyone was disapointed not to get a Gold medal it didn't show and I got to meet Rachel herself and husband Gareth as well as Rachel's MD Neil. They were all really nice and down to earth and Neil gave a speeech, including lovely comments about the stand and gardens, and even gave me a bottle of champagne! After that we all went to a Gala night black tie dinner dance in one of the marquees and my wife Katharine and I danced the night away to the live band. At the end we all went out to see the spectacular firework finale to celebrate the start of the show. On Saturday I came back to the Show. It was really odd as it felt like weeks ago since I was here and yet really it was only 3 days! Everything looked fine - in fact the plants seemed to have grown. Bob Sweet the RHS shows director and I were taking the winners of Rachel's competition around the show as part of their prize. They seemed to have had a great day with trips on the river and a good lunch at the show. The showground is massive so I hope Bob and I didnt tire them out too much. All the winners were really enthusiastic and it was nice to have the opportunity to show them my favourtite things and, of course, show them all around the "Passion for Taste" and "Stylish by Nature" Gardens. I'm delighted to see that the fruit in Passion for Taste is still showing well and the blueberries are now blue - there is a sumptouos smell of fruit around attracting lots of comment. It's great to hear people enthusing over things that not so long ago were just ideas in my head and scribbles on a sheet of paper! The Silver medal winning "Stylish by Nature Garden" has been also attracting lots of interest - in fact one admirer has asked me to see if it can be rebuilt in their Garden - which would be great if it's possible. And now it's time to close the Garden down. A fair bit of my time away has involved me beginning to arrange for the breakdown of the exhibit. This is always complex as the RHS expect the plot to be just clean and clear by the 15th of July, so there is plenty of time pressure here and it's important that everyone turns up at the right time...

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

The big reveal

The heatwave that stayed with us from the beginning of the Garden build to the end was incredible. Every day the weather report raised the expected temperature - and everyday the sun obliged. We had to water the plants at least twice a day yet still many, in particular the fruit trees, were clearly stressed. Martin announced his phone was telling him that it was 35 degrees one day and my car said 33 degrees. We would slap on the factor 30, drink gallons of bottled water and knuckle down to creating the two gardens and the sampling area. It was such a joy because you're working alongside the best gardeners in the country at one of the premier flower shows in the world, in a stunning setting with the Palace as the backdrop.

We laid the recycled plastic interlocking grids for the public pathways quickly and dressed them with white and black gravel bands to match Rachel's colours. We were able to include the number ‘25’ within the grid's cells in recognition of Rachel's 25th Anniversary. We are proud to say we built Rachels Passion for Taste Garden with no concrete at all – even the sleeper wall was just set hard in layers of mud in its trench. When Breeze House built the thatched Gazebo last Tuesday it began to look very lived in with the specimen fruit trees already positioned. Ken Muir had delivered some superb fruit bushes on Monday prior to this and I enjoyed planting out the remainder of the Garden with radiating bands of the fruit crops. The dwarf Peach Bonanza looked impressive in full fruit and was already attracting interest.

By this time our new friends Chris, Ag and Polly had started setting up Rachel's sampling stand. They were really friendly and we were now all together as a team labouring under the hot sun, looking after each other. Scotts built the Black and White Summerhouse on the Monday and Martin built the wall around it the next day. With the specimen weeping silver Pear and white barked Birch this garden quickly took shape. I enjoyed the planting of this garden most as it required me to be very creative about the combinations I could achieve with the good looking plants in the silver, black and white range that I had selected. I had also had to make some changes to the paths and seat. The white stone chips were a much better effect than the black I had originally designed for on the two paths. This meant the white bench didn’t work at all – so I phoned up Garden furniture maker Chris Nagle and asked if he could provide one of his hand sculpted hardwood black ebony seats. He said ok and it arrived just in time. Not only was it a perfect fit, it looked great and was lovely to sit on as well!

The big day came on Monday the 6th. The Rachel's team rolled out the red carpet and had a grand opening party. The Royal Horticultural Society judges arrived to make their decisions and we were left biting our nails until late in the day when two medals duly arrived! A Bronze for "Passion for Taste" and rather appropriately a fantastic Silver medal for our silver anniversary themed "Stylish by Nature Garden"!

Thursday, 2 July 2009

The time has come

The time has come! It's Friday 25th June, I'm back at Hampton Court again and Rachel's ambitious display is underway. Let me take you on the Hampton Court Flower Show Garden build experience! Firstly you get there at 7:30am (latest!) You will have checked the previous day that everyone is going to arrive/deliver everything that was agreed. You come into Home Park through a small gate near Kingston Bridge - and you enter another world! It’s a sudden escape from the impending rush hour traffic snarl up. There are fields, willows swaying beside ponds, acres of knee high long grass and herds of fallow deer really close up to you. You arrive at the far end of the long water and it’s a tremendous view along it to the Palace in the distance. Also you get your first sight of the giant white marquees that have grown over the last week and which will house the indoor displays of the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. At the security gate we are checked to make sure we have our passes, safety boots and yellow hi viz safety jackets, then its on to stands C/93 that will become Rachels Passion for Taste Garden and C/94 - Rachels Stylish by Nature Garden. Time will pass so quickly now and we must press on. The core team is myself (organising, taking the decisions and primarily there as plantsman and support.) My right hand man is Martin who is an incredible work machine and will construct all the non specialist elements of both gardens. Finally, Graeme who is there to support us both and generally gets all the worst jobs! We will get extra input from various specialist sub contractors as the job progresses to take the exhibit through to completion. I'm pleased to find the RHS have already erected Rachel's Sampling Stand Marquee which sits behind our gardens. So, we start by removing all the grass in our allocated 150 sqm plot (with Martin on the digger and me enjoying driving a 2 tonne dumper for a change) removing the excavations to a near by stockpile. The weather is fantastic, warm and slightly overcast and I begin to enjoy the feeling of the private world that is the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show build up. With this done we are able to lay the recycled plastic cellular grid system around the Marquee as Silverland Stone company are the first to arrive with this and bags of the black and white chips that will fill the grids to provide a non slip, wheelchair friendly and dry surface for everyone visiting Rachels stand when they are sampling the foods or viewing the Gardens. Further deliveries arrive from Tendercare Nurseries (the bigger trees need to go in early), Putney Builders Merchants (sundry building materials and timber), and Ashwell Recycled Timber Ltd (with the Jarrah sleepers for the Passion for Taste Garden.) Saturday we get cooked! Martin's phone says it's 35 degrees and my car at 4pm says its 33 degrees! But we have a great day and move forwards really well. We are joined by Phil who cuts the Jarrah sleepers to all the lengths and angles we need. I've set out the Garden shapes and Martin lays the Passion for Taste pathways. Graeme begins the arduous job of filling the grid system with the stone chips. Martin and I also get most of the big pot size trees planted in Passion for Taste. And suddenly after 2 days we have one garden coming to life!

Thursday, 25 June 2009

Getting Fruity

Rachel's Organic Passion for Taste Garden is all about FRUIT. People dedicate their lives to growing fruit and we’ve got a fantastic bunch of experts at Ken Muir Nurseries in Essex bringing on the specimens that bear the fruit we take for granted when we enjoy Rachel's delicious tastes. I took time out last week to check out how the plants were getting on and I wasn’t disappointed. I had planned to visit a day earlier, but got stuck in the dreaded M25 car park, gave up and decided to go the next day. That meant I missed Roger and Kevin Muir, but Sue Muir was there to show me round – this is a proper family business! Actually this was something of a trip down memory lane for me. The Muirs’ Nursery is in Weeley near Clacton. Back in the 70’s this was the site of a Woodstock size Rock Festival and friends and I camped there for the weekend. The bands that played were the pick of the Rock world at the time, including Rory Galagher, King Crimson, Lindisfarne, TRex and weirdly the Groundhogs who I saw last year at our own concert hall in Falmouth. The pick of the bunch was a young Rod Stewart and the Faces which remains one of the best sets I've ever seen. Sue told me she had camped there as well so we were able to reminisce! I'm acutely aware looking at the trees and bushes that there is really relatively little point in me deciding what individual plants should be set aside for the show. The reality is that 24 hours is a long time in the world of fruit. Blackcurrants dripping in dark bunches of fruit now will be well over by the time we need it – strawberries and raspberies that look green and uninspiring now will be laden in ripe fruit during the first week in July. So I'm told anyway! To be honest I've just got to rely on this family team that have 12 RHS Gold medals and over 40 years of growing under their belt! I've given them a list of the type of plants that go into Rachel's products and most of them will appear in our display, apart from the exotic ones like bananas - which would look a little out of place in combination with gooseberries! So, in short, we are going to have fine blackcurrants, strawberries, peaches and cherries. Will the gooseberries be over? Will the Rhubarb grow a bit more? Will the blueberries actually be blue? The Muirs are delivering the plants on Monday 29th and Ive realized I had better get a net over all those fruit bushes before they are eaten before judging! I had a classic nightmare about building the garden last night! The digger had broken down and couldn’t be repaired for 2 days, my digger driver Martin was drunk and wouldn’t listen to me and the site for the garden had been changed by the RHS to a position next to some children’s play equipment where it would be impossible to build. I was in despair and was relieved to wake up! Opposite to dreams?

Friday, 19 June 2009

Decision time!

Hello! These last two weeks before the start of our build on site at the Show on the 26th June are a critical period. Up to now I've always had options about just exactly what will be in each Garden. But now is the time to make hard and fast decisions, chose one thing in preference to another and place your orders, with delivery dates and times. With this in mind I arrived at Tendercare Ltd at Denham just off the A40 near Uxbridge on the edge of London. This is a Nursery I’ve dealt with over many years and it specializes in mature plants. For anyone building a show garden it’s important to get a feeling of established planting, you just can’t do it with ordinary Garden Centre plants. Tendercare Nursery has grown to become a cornucopia of specimen trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials. I knew they would have the answers to my planting needs for Rachel’s Stylish by Nature Garden! Now is the time to choose plants you feel confident will look perfect in 2/3 weeks time. So I had a great time being shown around by sales manager Saija, and I selected the majority of the plants that will be used in our tricky monochromatic Garden. We need plenty of silver plants in recognition of Rachel’s 25th anniversary. Fortunately nature is very generous here with many fine plants displaying this type of foliage. In particular you get many seaside and Mediterranean plants sporting grey or silver leaves. This is mainly to do with needing to have tougher foliage to reduce water loss. I needed a 2nd tree to balance with the weeping pear I’ve already chosen (which will sit behind and frame the garden seat.) I had imagined it would be another weeping tree like a silver birch but here we go – and this is why I hate to have to confirm a planting list – I decided that that type of tree would be wrong, for 2 reasons. Firstly a weeping silver birch might sound silver but it will actually look predominantly green, with its leaves hiding its only silver feature, that being its beautiful white bark. Secondly such a tree takes up a lot of space, and this is a small garden. But I need something tall and proportionate to the Gazebo which will otherwise totally dominate the garden (sadly now you see what worries me in my sleep!) I settled on a fantastic slim and elegant Birch tree - Betula Doorenbos which makes full use of its brilliant white trunk with a light canopy of leaves which won’t distract from the overall silver/white/grey/black theme of the garden. Anyway I'm pleased to say this is now my definitive list for the Rachel’s Organic Stylish by Nature Garden – celebrating 25 years (not taking into account Beales and Mattocks White flowering Roses – more on these another day!) Silver / White / Grey: Olearia macrodonata Cotoneaster franchetti Artemisia Powis Castle Santolina chamaecyparissus Koelaria glauca Stachys Silver Castle Hosta Elegans Festuca glauca Astelia Silver Spear Euphorbia Silver Swan Cyanara cardunculus Dactylis variegata Pyrus salicifolia Betula Doorenbos Dark/Black: Sambucus Black Lace Ajuga Braunberg Pittosporum Tom Thumb Heuchera Palace Purple Weigela Follis Purpurea Ophiophogon nigrescens Prunus cerasifera Nigra Penstemon Huskers Red Lysimachia Firecracker

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

More news from Paul at Hampton Court!

Hello again! Did you know both the Rachel's Gardens have Gazebos? These are great mini shelters for any size garden. In both show gardens they will provide a hub and focal point around which the rest of the garden works. In Rachel's Passion for Taste Garden we have a pretty thatched timber Gazebo, a brand new product from the company Breeze House Ltd from Leek in Staffordshire. Positioned in the corner of the plot it will provide a great spot to sit and watch the fruit ripening all around you! I'm going to decorate and fill it with dried flowers and produce to suggest it’s a store as well as a good place to relax in the shade. It's open sided so will catch any cool breezes - as I'm hoping for a good hot summer at Hampton Court this year! I'm also planning to get some climbers going over it – I have my eye on a good size Actinidia (Kiwi plant) which is a fine climber for a sheltered south facing position. In Rachel's Stylish by Nature Garden we have a more formal timber and Glass panel Gazebo currently being specially prepared by Scotts of Therapston, Northamptonshire. This building is a very up market and will sit in the centre of the plot. Its octagonal with 2 panels on each side as windows and a central one as plain timber. The remaining two panels are open entrances. The idea is you can walk through it from one side of the garden to the other. Scotts are painting the exterior black and the window frames and interior white, to make it especially Rachel's! They are also leaving me an opportunity to fit a daisy design onto the finial – one more thing to think about! It will have seats on 2 sides so again a nice place for the Rachel's team to rest up after a hard day manning the stand at the show! I would like to get some fragrant white flowering roses over the building, the variety is a bit in the balance. Robert Mattock of Abingdon, Berkshire produces fine large climbing and rambling specimens in containers and I would like the intoxicatingly scented and appropriately named Paul’s Himalayan Musk … but will it be in flower?! More news coming soon!

Wednesday, 3 June 2009

Rachel's Show Gardens - an update from Paul

Its always exiting yet a little frightening when June arrives and I know there is a big job to be done at Hampton Court Flower Show which opens 7th July! I have the fantastic opportunity to build 2 really special small gardens for Rachels Organic, which together with some extra touches around the sales and hospitality areas should make it a must visit venue at the Show! Back in April I met up with Rachels team on site in the Great Park at Hampton Court. We had a choice of 4 potential locations and opted for a superb position near the long water with the Palace as our backdrop. I start the build on the 26th of June and the Gardens will be judged on the 6th of July just before the Show opens. My first Garden is called “Rachels Organic Passion for Taste Garden” The idea here is to connect the Garden to the products and the organic and sustainable ways they are produced. Its good to be working with a company that has strong environmental policies. This garden will consist of only natural products – a thatched Gazebo storehouse and low sleeper wall with radiating sleeper pathway - all from sustainable timber sources and really the rest of the garden is all about plants. Im confident I will have strawberries, currants and blueberries. My fruit trees have been purchased but are already getting annoying diseases like peach leaf curl – apart from soapy water any good ideas?(ideas that are of an organic approach of course!) The second Garden is called ”Rachels Organic Stylish by Nature Garden” This will be a fragrant monochromatic garden with the emphasis on silver as it's Rachels 25th anniversary this year! I've got a lovely big weeping silver pear tree already lined up for this garden, but I've still got a lot of leg work to do with the rest of the plants. Peter Beales Roses of Norwich are going to provide me with highly scented white roses, and I've been promised some pure black Ophiophogon grasses from another supplier. Its important this garden matches its name and reflects the class of Rachels products. More updates coming soon!

Thursday, 28 May 2009

News from Chelsea

A big "Congratulations" to Paul from all at Rachel's for his fabulous, silver medal winning Garden at Chelsea. The Garden - 'The Key' - was the result of a unique and ambitious partnership between the Homes and Communications Agency, Communities and Local Government, the Eden Project, Homeless Link and the London Employer Accord. Intended to highlight the work of Places of Change, which seeks to improve services for the homeless, most of the 10,000 plants needed for the Garden were grown by homeless people from around the country. Located on Chelsea's biggest plot, the Garden was an innovative combination of both decorative ornamental plants and productive plants, which not only look good but also provide food. The construction of the Garden was as environmentally friendly as possible - the carbon footprint was minimised using as little hard landscaping as possible and all materials came from recycled or sustainable sources. Now that the show is over, a small part of the Garden will return to Eden, whilst other sections will be distributed to various homeless organisations. As for Paul - well it's all systems go with the Rachel's Gardens at Hampton Court Palace Flower Show and there will be plenty of blogs from Paul so you can keep up with his progress and for a sneak preview! So - please do come back soon!