This is going to be a quick, one topic blog post.

I have spent the last 10 days at Tatton Park, building a show garden, ‘Grasses with Grace’. The garden was conceived about 9 months ago, centred on an idea of ornamental grasses with a sculpture. It was been gestating slowly in my imagination, growing a little each day, its shapes and colours slowly crystallising. A few months ago I sketched an outline of how I hoped it will look and wrote carefully considered words about it, but until last Monday the garden existed only in my head. Last week I saw its outlines for the first time in the shape of an oval circle in Tatton’s turf and now, ten days later, it’s rising from the ground under my soil encrusted hands.

I love this experience. Over the past five years it’s become the anchoring event in my gardening year. There’s no question for me that creating a show garden is a form of 3D art – you conceive an idea, develop it into a complete piece in your mind’s eye, bring together your selected materials and set them together to create a specific visual experience for the viewer. Go on, tell me it’s not.

Whatever show gardening is, it’s slow, slow work. By my reckoning it takes about 2 hours per square metre of planting. Each plant needs cleaning up then placing and balancing with its neighbours. I do this for about half a dozen plants at a time. Then we take them all out, dig holes, drop the plants into place, turn each one to its best aspect before back filling and finally mulching.

And this is on top of the time spent deciding if it is the right choice of plant in that spot and re-planting when an idea doesn’t quite work out. It’s easy to see how a morning can slide by.

It’s painstaking work, but this is how I have to do it, so I start planting early to allow time for my slow ways. I started planting four days ago and there are four days left. We have finished about two-thirds of it. Some of the show gardens have not planted a single plant yet. They will probably be fine, but I couldn’t work like that. It leaves no time for thinking, for engaging with the plants and for them to settle into place. And it most certainly doesn’t allow time off for bad weather. And bad weather is exactly what is forecast for the weekend. I hope they are OK, for their sake and the show’s sake.

So that’s it for now. I just wanted to collect my thoughts. I might post a couple of pictures tomorrow…

July 14, 2011