Hi I’m Kath and I am Harlow Carr Garden’s latest recruit. I work on the ornamental team ‘Gardens West’ and my permanent contract has just begun on the 1st October. This is very exciting for me as I have worked for many years in the chocolate industry. Eventually, after doing 4 years at evening classes nurturing my desire to know more about what makes plants ‘tick’, I took the plunge and with the help of redundancy undertook a Foundation Degree in Horticulture, which lead me to the door of the gardens at Harlow Carr. Of course I’ve never looked back and have been here working on a temporary contract all summer. Following a successful interview I find myself deeply engrossed in the day to day tasks that make up the running of the gardens.
Today along with the rest of Gardens West we have been putting the finishing touches on a new mini meadow area, this has involved lightly cultivating in the grass mixture seed, I say lightly cultivating, because in amongst the seed are even newer recruits than me and they are the little mini plug plants which were planted in this area last week.
There they all are standing up proudly like little soldiers. There are Silene dioica, (Red campion) Pilosella (Fox and cubs) Plantago major (Plantian) and Agrostemma githago (Corncockle) amongst them, all grown on site from collected seed, and lovingly nurtured through their early stages of planthood.
There was a lot of work to get them to the planting stage which you probably already know about if you’ve read earlier instalments from the Gardens West blog. So now it’s wait and see time to see how both me and the meadow establishes over the coming months......
Kath Musgrove - Gardener