My Garden

Today we spent the whole day wading in the pond with rolled up trousers, planting up all the marginals. At first, the water seemed quite pleasant, but as the day wore on, so the chill set in and morale started to dip amongst my wonderful volunteer planters. Saggy trouser legs and other bits of clothing became wet, further exacerbated by the onset of rain at 6.00pm. I decided to call it a day before my volunteers became mutinous. As I made my way back to Sloane St tube, the phone rang with my hosts (who are bravely putting me up for the Chelsea duration) asking me to pop into their favourite Chinese restaurant for a bite to eat. I looked like an exceptionally muddy drowned rat and tried to back out due to my appearance but was persuaded otherwise on the grounds of needing a decent meal. The restaurant was rather smart and upon entry was reminded of that wonderful missing-the-dart-board-in-the-Slaughtered-Lamb-scene from An American Werewolf in London. Except this time it was chopsticks

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Yesterday I had to go down to Wisley to do the additional BBC Chelsea coverage for the Red Button option (which I'm not completely au fait with, but will get my 15 year old son to explain to me). What we had to do is pretend to be in our show garden at Chelsea and give a tour as though we were actually there....in the present tense. This was fatal as I kept saying things like: "beside the sculpture will be Sarracenia flava" instead of "and here are the Sarracenia flava beside the sculpture". This may sound easy to you but imagine sitting in the middle of Wisley gardens with people milling around and a giant tin foil sun reflector shining in your face and you're trying not to squint. Then you would find that difficult...or you will find that difficult...or you are finding that difficult...I'm no longer sure anymore

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Much to the delight of the staff, we spent this morning turfing 50 square metres of the Chelsea-dedicated polytunnel at Howard Nurseries. In actual fact it's wildflower turf from Coronet Turf Ltd that we need to push on a bit in time for Chelsea. I am hoping for a good show of ragged robin that is evidently abundant in the turf. We rolled out a sheet of black plastic and raked out about 10mm of compost for the turf to root into. However, I'm a little concerned about how we are going to get it to Chelsea as we will not be able to roll it back up again - but I'm sure we'll think of something.

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In the garden we are going to have a female sculpture who represents an ideal of humanity/ guardian of the environment. She will be sitting overlooking our wave sculpture; the idea being that she is keeping watch over our tumultuous world ready to cope and adapt to any waves of change. Yesterday, I met the highly talented artist Nikki Taylor who is going to sculpt our figure using copper mesh (www.nikkitaylorsculpture.com). I also met her beautiful model Connie who will be immortalised in the form of sculpture. After much positioning, prodding and pushing limbs around, we found the perfect pose which we liked to call relaxed poised. It's funny though, the sculpture started life as the 'Guardian of the Environment' and then became the 'Ideal of Humanity'. She's now called Connie

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Just got a call from a nursery saying that they will pot up my stuff for next week. I (being concerned that there's only 7 weeks to go) asked whether it would be ready for Chelsea and they replied that it would be touch and go!!!!! Why the hell didn't they discuss this with me before? The order went in before Christmas So it's back to calling every nursery up to see what they have in large sizes

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Back in 2000 I spent 8 weeks in SE USA knee deep in bogs studying the carnivorous plant's dependency in fire. The short and long of it is that we should be setting fire to these American woodlands on a regular basis. The tree species in that area have evolved to cope with fire, in fact Pinus serotina needs fire to open its cones and release the seed. If burnt regularly, debris would not build up and create a 'hot' devastating fire. Instead we would have 'cool' quick non-damaging fires. The bogs within these forests would be kept clear of competitive growth and the carnivorous plants would thrive. But no, the US Forestry Service don't see it like that: when I mentioned the perfect solution it was met with resistance and the threat of arrest. No they much prefer the costly non-eco approach of keeping the undergrowth down with the avid use of herbicides. As a result many populations of Venus fly-trap, Sarracenia sp. Drosera sp. are so small they are not genetically diverse enough to outbreed and survive. So this Chelsea Flower Show is dedicated to the plight of the carnivorous plant and will highlight its vulnerability as a direct result of US Forestry Service's complete ignorance to understand the serious threat they are causing to wildlife in the forests of SE USA.

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