A few highlights from Hampton Court Flower Show

Term has finished, I am now in Brighton doing some work experience and have found a bit of time to look through the masses of photos I took at Hampton Court Flower Show. Here are some highlights, particularly from the small gardens which provide great sources of inspiration:

This is the Burgeon & Ball 5-a-day garden, basically masses of fruit and veg crammed into a tiny garden in lots of innovative ways.

I rather liked the table centre salad and edible flowers (so did Gardeners' World as they presented some of it from this table).

These pouches mounted around the walls look pretty but I'm a bit sceptical about how they'd do over any prolonged period, particularly if dry. They use the same principle as our Ladder Allotment though (lots of tiers and using a geotextile fabric) but just on a tiny scale. I can vouch for the continued success of the LA but I just think these pouches could succomb to lack of water unless looked after very well indeed.

The pictures below are of two small gardens I thought were great: on the left is called Wild in the City and was designed by the winner of a student garden competition run by Wyevale nurseries. Look at the wall of sawn logs at the back - these are just packed together between uprights. These could look great in an urban back garden or courtyard and I was assured that they would last! I love the chairs too, not too keen on the deck below but overall a beautful garden. 

The picture on the right is of the Heathers in Harmony garden. Unsurprisingly the planting was all about heathers but it is the design of the garden with sunken levels which really stood out. The heather highlight was the chequerboard effect heather hedge running along the back of the garden - it could look a bit crazy when flowering but this foliage effect is great.

 I have masses of photos from the Floral Marquee which features scores of nurseries displaying, and selling, thousands of different types of plants. I loved it because the plants are displayed with labels and it is possible to get right up close to take photos and look at planting combinations. I won't bore you with many, but here are a couple of my favourites from within the giant (and it is absolutely huge) tent. Three very different perennials:

And so a quick glimpse at the Conceptual Gardens, or rather just one because this post is starting to get too long! This section of the show presents gardens which present a concept and which do not aim to be workable, practical gardens. They are to make people think and display gardens in different forms. By far the most popular and publicised garden this year was Excuse Me White I Touch the Sky, designed by Anoushka Feiler who was a diploma student at KLC last year. She cleaned up in terms of public appeal - I spent an afternoon helping her out hold back the crowds so I can vouch for that. The garden is about pursuing ideas and asking whether the sky is the limit - with upside pots and mirrors for reflection, visitors could wander about inside looking at plants 'in the sky'. It was certainly a success! My pictures (complete with thundery skies and my reflection) don't really do the garden justice but if you click on the link you'll see more about it. 



That will do for now - there were quite a few other gardens that I really liked and perhaps I'll add a few more when I get the chance. Thats it for me and flower shows for the year, I think. Now I just have to think about when, whether and how to get an entry in for one of them myself...

Bits and pieces - our garden, Chelsea and Hampton Court

I have emerged from project madness - this one was a primary school garden in Wimbledon and it has consumed my life for the last couple of weeks. We had to present our work at the school where it was judged by hundreds of 5-11 year olds! They don't hold back, that's for sure. Anyway, now I'm done and giving myself the morning off, I thought I would just put a few bits and pieces here that I've been meaning to add for a while.

  

Top - tumbling toms, middle - courgettes,
bottom - strawberries



First, I thought you might like to see the progress of the Ladder Allotment in our garden which I love! Everything is growing like mad and, so far, the slugs and snails don't seem to have figured out how to get in. I couldn't resist putting one of these in my school garden proposal.

Cosmos

A lovely surprise has been the Cosmos given to us my Jon's parents. We didn't have a clue what colour they were going to be and I was slightly worried about more pink. But, they are all a beautiful deep magenta colour and they look great - Cosmos has lovely fine foliage and flower like mad - they make great cut flowers. In our garden they are adding some really useful vertical colour as we're a bit lacking in later flowering tall perennials. A great Cosmos that we don't have is the alluringly named Chocolate Cosmos (Cosmos atrosanguineus) which have chocolately brown flowers. I'd buy the variety 'Chocamocha' just for the name!

Philippa and our handywork -
I think a bit survived unchanged!

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show was a few weeks ago now and seems long gone. But I'm fortunate to have a few plants from show in our garden, admittedly looking a little more modest there than they did there. I got the chance to help Ann-Marie Powell build the British Heart Foundation Garden which she designed to support the charity's Mending Broken Hearts appeal. It was a great experience to be there in the build-up to see the incredible amount of construction and manpower that goes into creating the show gardens. Here is my classmate Philippa stuffing some hostas, grasses (lots of bright green Hakonechloa) and ferns (you can see to the left of the picture my favourite, the red-tinged Dryopteris erythrosora)  between the giant red steps in Ann-Marie's garden - we like to think that we played a small part in how the garden finally looked!!

Here you can see a video tour of the finished garden on the BBC's Chelsea Flower Show website. It really was a striking garden with lush planting and a strong message.



I can't resist including a picture of Cleve West's garden
this planting was so inspiring



On the final day of Chelsea, there is a sell-off of plants by many gardens and stands. I was there that day because I was helping out again, this time on The Daily Telegraph Garden designd by Cleve West which won Best in Show (here's the video tour). Working in show week involves handing out information to the public, answering questions etc. You can imagine how popular this garden was because it had won the ultimate prize and was stunning. It was a lot of fun to do it and I am very glad I swotted up on the plants beforehand because it made it lot more rewarding when people asked searching questions!





Bright red spores on
the underside of D.erythrosa
foliage

Anyway, I made sure I headed over to the British Heart Foundation garden at the end of the day  to get some souvenirs. I could barely carry them all on the bus but it was worth it. So here we have one of the two Dryopteris erythrosa I grabbed sitting next to an Alchemilla mollis which I also popped in my bag for good measure (with a bit of added water to show how beautiful the droplets are on the leaves).

Fern and froth: Dryopteris
erythrosora and Alchemilla mollis

Vietnamese coriander

And just one more Chelsea souvenir plant (there were a couple of others stuffed in my bags too...) This is Vietnamese coriander or Rau Ram (Persicaria odorata) which can be used in cooking but just looks great with its maroon V-shaped marks on the leaves. It's a frost tender perennial herb and looked great planted at the front of the British Heart Foundation garden set against the bright red metal structure.

I thought I would add a couple of pictures of the garden our class is tending to at Hampton Court Palace. It is tucked away, off the main visitor route, and is in what was the Apprentices' Garden. We are growing a fairly random selection of fruit, vegetables and plants, and most of what we've planted has been propogated at home by the class. It's a bit tricky finding the time to get down to the garden to work on it but it is actually looking pretty good, not least because it is given some regular TLC by one of our tutors, Amanda.

So I'm going to leave it there and go and do some work! It's less than 3 weeks until the end of term and exams loom. Hampton Court Flower show is on 5th-11th July and I'll be helping out there too. Should be fun. Then 2 months 'off'... more on what I'll be doing in the holidays later.



Georgie and Amanda watering and hoeing respectively!





Philippa again, this time watering some veg.