My Garden

Now the garden is complete and the show open we can all relax - not quiet! I'm responsible for the Cheshire Wildlife Trust stand, so I have to get on site early to make sure everything is OK. All the information sheets have to be put out, along with the merchandise, the stand opened up and made ready for the public. The real work starts when the public arrives; handing out leaflets, talking to people and answering questions. However we are getting loads of positive comments about the garden, and its all great fun. The sunshine all afternoon makes things even better. The garden looks lovely in the sunshine - have a look at the photos! 

Towards the end of the afternoon I have to do a turn in the Talks tent, talking about Wildlife and Gardens, of course. At the end there are some good questions (mostly about slugs), and a lot of the audience come over to visit the stand and garden. 

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Tuesday, the day the gardens are judged, starts with a disaster. Somehow a hose has been left running overnight and our garden is flooded. The sunken seating area is a foot deep in muddy water with the log pile floating on top. It's a nightmare. The garden has to be baled out, the log piles re-built, the gravel dug out, washed and replaced, and all the wood and paving cleaned. This is in addition to the last minute primping and preening necessary to prepare a show garden for the RHS judges. 

The organisers are sympathetic, and agree for us to be judged last, giving us more time. We also get sympathy and offers of help from many other sources. Reaseheath College offer to send a couple of students to help, but in the end there are half a dozen of them helping. One of the wonderful thing about Tatton is how friendly everyone is, and willing to help each other out. 

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The weather goes from one extreme to another, non-stop rain yesterday, glorious sunshine today. The judging is tomorrow, so everything has to be finished today. Most of the day is spent planting, then covering the compost with a mulch of bark chips. This has to be done carefully, to protect the plants and not to spill too much compost on the woodwork. For an RHS show garden the plants have to be in immaculate condition. This means every damaged leaf has to be removed, every spot of compost on the leaves carefully brushed away, and dead-heading will be a daily ritual. Plants that are less than perfect are rejected - although they will be found good homes later. I hate waste, so after Tatton all the plants will be sold off or re-used in other wildlife-friendly gardens.

When plantng is complete we have to scrub every trace of mud off the woodwork. When the judges come around tomorrow it must look as though it has been basking in the sunshine for months! We are keeping our fingers well crossed and hoping the judges like it as much as we do. Then I'm looking forward to relaxing a bit, and having time to appreciate all the other wonderful gardens on the showground

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The weather has turned against us again, with rain forecast all day. But we have to get on, there's so little time left. We rig up tarpaulins over most of the garden, then get on with the planting. First of all the plants are placed, so we can see how they look before actually digging them in. They bring the garden to life. There is a lot of foliage, including some lovely tactile grasses, and high points of blue and orange. 

Everything is so muddy, its really difficult trying to keep the wood and paving clean. Tomorrow, when planting is complete, we will have to scrub everything. 

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Today was a day for concentrating on details. The copper panels which are a  feature of the garden had to be secured, polished and lacquered to keep their shine. I cut up loads of logs for the wood pile and tidied up the work area.

The sky started cloudy, then cleared, and the afternoon was gloriously sunny. The site is very muddy from last nights downpours. All day work teams have been bringing in tons of woodchips to fill in the muddiest spots. The RHS seem very well organised and capable of coping with anything

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The weather was against us today. What started as a steady drizzle in the morning gradually got heavier and heavier. In the morning I gave all the plants a liquid feed, to help them look their best; I felt very silly watering the plants in the rain. 

Last night we finished the ponds and overflows. The garden has a really strong structure, and looks great already. This afternoon we started on the planting - into the walls! Some of the gaps in the walls are filled with Sempervivums - they look startling once in place. Other gaps in the wall are backed with copper, echoing copper elsewhere in the garden and the overall colour scheme. 

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I was off site yesterday, getting on with stuff in the office. When I come to the showground today the change is remarkable. The walls are almost full height, the paving is in place, as are the stepping stones, and the timbers outlining the ponds and bog area are in place. It's starting to look like a garden! 

Throughout the day, the operation is masterminded by Jo and Nicky, our designers. They keep all the volunteers busy, constantly checking all the 1001 details necessary for a spectacular garden. As well as the construction work the rest of the plants arrive today - some British native wildflowers for the bog area. All the plants need careful checking, watering, and some get a manicure! 

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Tuesday dawned fine and bright, after yesterdays rain. The area around our garden still looks like a building site, which it is. We are still processing all the sleepers, but our volunteers have organised themselves into an efficient production line, and by mid-afternoon all the sleepers have been planed smooth, sanded, and given a coat of wood stain. 

The foundations of the garden are all in place by the end of the day. This has been a slow job as all the pieces have to cut and placed with fine precision. The garden is a geometric design of triangles and diamonds, and to look right all the angles and joints must be exact. Our carpenters keep measuring and checking to make sure everything is as it should be. 

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Our first day building our garden at a slightly soggy Tatton Park. What will be our garden is a rectangle of bare earth. The morning is a series of deliveries; building materials, a cement mixer and generator, and the timbers for our wooden back wall. This wall will be built of oak sleepers, nearly 2 tons of them. They all have to be planed, sanded, and painted with wood stain. We also start digging out the garden. Part of it will be a sunken area, so we need a big excavation. To save time and our muscles we have a mini-digger to do most of the work. 

We also have a team of helpers, volunteers from Barclays Bank. Soon they are all busy preparing the timbers and helping build the wall. 

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I collected the log pile for our garden today. Log piles are a really great habitat for all sorts of creepy-crawlies, every garden should have one, so naturally there will be one in our wildlife-friendly garden at Tatton. The logs have come from one of the Wildlife Trust's reserves, where they were cut last winter as part of the normal maintenance work. This particular reserve is a piece of peaty, boggy heathland, which had been colonised by birch trees. The birch was felled to allow the heath vegetation to flourish. The logs had been stacked and left to rot, but now a few will star in our Tatton garden.

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Only a couple of weeks until we start to build our garden. I'm getting into all the little admin details; making sure we've got enough volunteers for the build, arranging van hire, getting the leaflet together, sourcing some materials for the garden. The list is endless, and I'm sure there's things I've forgotton. 

I went up to Tatton Park yesterday, on business unconnected to the show. They were just beginning to lay out the show ground, putting up the perimeter fence, and mowing the carpark with a big tractor. The show takes place within Tatton Park. One of the unexpected pleasures of the show is returning to the exhibitors car park at the end of the day and finding deer browsing among the cars.

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Only a month to go before we start building our garden and I'm beginning to get a bit twitchy. There's no reason to, our garden designers are doing their bit, and we've got volunteers lined up to help with the build and man the stall once the show is open. Our exhibitor tickets arrived today. Maybe the weather is getting to me, two days of torrential downpour is not a good omen. Never mind - at least it'll keep the grass green!

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