I know I promised you a blog post about Hampton Court. But that was three weeks ago and my thoughts on it have been all but blotted out by my annual stint at Tatton Show. To some extent it’s the Cinderella of the three big RHS shows but Tatton Park is 20 minutes from home and over the past five years it’s become the pivotal event of my year.


I’ve built gardens at the show for the past five years; four back to backs and last year my first proper show garden, Grasses with Grace, which earned me my first, and hopefully not my last, shiny RHS Gold medal. 
But I’m not really a garden designer and I have never had a proper sponsor. With one exception, all were designed with the minimum of hard landscaping and built without a landscaping contractor. 

The show gardens I created were, in essence, vehicles for showing off the plants I love. ‘Grace’ was designed to show off late summer flowering perennials in a series of combinations with early flowering perennial grasses. 

Or, as James A Sinclair put it most succinctly last week – a flower bed with a path through it. I have been thoroughly rumbled. I could argue that there were also four large trees (now gracing the new canal border here), the path was wide and curved and perfectly executed, there was a fine sculpture (see left) and some twiddly metal poles. But really, they were included to tick some show gardening boxes. For me, it was all about the plants. 

Anyway, my show gardening stint has given me five years to figure out which plants I could absolutely count on to flower in time for Tatton Show this year for my first floral marquee display. Or so I thought before this summer’s rain and low light confounded matters. 


Several times a day last week I was asked why I hadn’t created a show garden this year. Why indeed? Why spend two and a half days creating a display indoors in the dry, sell a thousand plants in five days, and dismantle it all in three hours, when I could have spent two weeks building a garden in the rain, five days handing out damp leaflets to half-interested visitors, then spend a week lugging it all back to the nursery and two weeks cleaning up 800 mud caked plants? There’s no contest. I’ll carry on exhibiting in the floral marquee for as long as they’ll have me.

Which might not be long… It wasn’t the finest display in the marquee. It was too high, for a start, and some of the plants were a bit small (my show Echinaceas declined to flower in time). And I don’t think I’m supposed to let drape plants drape themselves louchely over the stand edges. But visitors loved its loose airiness. And more than one exhibitor said it was nice to see plants able to move, to ‘breathe’. But it didn’t please the judges one bit. It was too ‘stemmy’. And the slate path to the circular path in the centre was in the wrong place. So I’ve joined the eminent company of Mark Diacono and Simon Webster in the RHS Bronze medal club. In fact I am now the proud owner of a full set – one Bronze, two Silvers, two Silver-Gilts and a Gold. (At least, I thought I had the set until Mary Hoult dropped by and upstaged me. She has the proper full set, one of everything, including a ‘Letter’.)
The funny thing is, I got much better PR this year with my bare pass 5/12 display than my near top marks effort last year for which I got absolutely zilch, not even an overhead camera pass during the GW programme credits. Carol Klein loved this part of the stand especially and enthused rapturously about the Anthemis and Achillea on GW. I was interviewed by Ann Swithenbank for Gardener’s Question Time, who was very taken with my three different Sanguisorbas and the Echinaceas. Matthew Wilson named my Agastache ‘Summer Glow’ his favourite plant of the show, which was nice, except that I’d sold out of it by the time the GQT audience streamed out of the talks marquee, obediently following his orders to come and buy one from me. The compliments flowed like a warm breeze in the sunshine, which surprised us all by turning up on the first day of opening and sticking around all week. 

The week got off to a most pleasurable start too – I spent Tuesday evening at the President’s Dinner seated between Chris Beardshaw (no introduction needed here) and Edward Pysden (Chair of Marketing Cheshire, former Chair of the Halle Orchestra and all round good egg) for which, thank you Caroline, queen of the seating plan :-). 


Huge thanks also to everyone back at the nursery for all the prep work and for tiptoeing round me even more than usual in the run up to the show. Thanks also to Alison for helping with the build and brightening the marquee in her inimitable fashion, courtesy of her Daisy Dukes, and especially to Sharon H, Sharon L, and Nicky for stepping in to help out with manning the stand at the very last minute. All three learnt the plants on the display in minutes and put my plant retailing skills to shame. I’d have been stuck without you :-) 

To round off my account, for the record, I gave four talks on my top 20 herbaceous perennials to moderately full audiences in the talks tent, sat on three Q&A panels, lent 250 plants to two show gardens (pics to follow on a later update) and jointly led what we all hope will prove to be a pivotal meeting with the RHS about regional development. 

So, after a jam-packed week, it’s back to the nursery and the unpacking and clearing up and catching up with the admin and bill paying and washing and all the rest of it. Till next year then. 
July 24, 2012