My Garden

The result at Malvern with The RHS Gold Medal and Best in Show was fantastic and really sets the tone for the year ahead!   Obviously, I am personally pleased with how well it did, but the biggest pleasure is that it rewards the team behind it all and especially the girls at Adcote School.  It's great that the garden stood up so well despite the appalling weather but thank you to everyone who braved the wind and rain - we really hope you enjoyed the show.  There's no doubt in my mind that the one thing that stole the show were the Gloucester Old Spot pigs - they arrived with no names but left christened Buttercup and Primrose!

We literally ran from Malvern down to Chelsea where the hard landscape on the stand was almost complete with the pathways and hedges in and our summerhouse ready for decorating.  The rather mercurial British summer weather has continued, so one minute we are in T-shirts and the next minute we are all standing under bin bags and we have to tread carefully through the mud so as not to go flying

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‘You must be mad’ is a comment that’s been leveled at me often over the last few weeks as it comes to light to many that I have designed and am in the process of building no less than three major RHS show gardens this year.  For me and my teams it is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of work and it’s at this point that it starts getting really exciting!

I am just putting the finishing touches to the garden I have produced for The Three Counties at the Malvern Spring Gardening Show which I have worked together with Adcote School for Girls, based up in Shrewsbury.  It’s been a fantastic and fast moving project to work on and aims, I hope, to demonstrate what a typical homestead in the Three Counties area would have looked like in the mid 1800’s.  The main purpose has been to highlight the skills, expertise and understanding such people had of the land, crops and livestock around them and how the subtle beauty and diversity of the Three Counties has been shaped.  Hopefully it will inform future generations about the landscape as they in turn become the custodians. 

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