Tag Archives: Hampton Court Flower Show

A Hampton Court takeaway

06 Monday Jul 2015

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It’s been a funny old Hampton Court Flower Show this year. Mainly because I was there not so much as gardening hack but as part of the show: on Wednesday you’d have found me in the Cookery Theatre, holding forth about all the different ways you can become self-sufficient (and that does mean you, wherever you live: for more, look out for my new bookywook, in a bookshop near you this Christmas).

But I did get the time to take a look around, while scuttling between giant fans in the doorways of the Floral Marquee: goodness but it was hot. I happened to be there on the hottest day of the week, too: 36 degrees it was. I was positively glowing.

As usual, show gardens, rose marquee and plant stands were full of good ideas to take home and make your own garden that little bit better. Here are a few of them:

alliums
Float allium heads on a pool of water: I’ve seen this done with hellebores before, but never with alliums. What a lovely way to display those exquisite starry blooms up close.

belljars 
Grow air plants in mini terrariums: Spotted in the Floral Marquee, these are just too perfect. Terrariums (terraria, whatev) are big right now, and air plants like these tillandsia are made for them. The glass keeps humidity levels high, and the plant needs only moisture in the air to survive. If you fancy a change for the Christmas tree this year – this could be it…

blackwall
Use simple planting against textured black walls for sheer drama: Less is most definitely more in this striking planting discovered round the back of ‘Green Seam’, the Best in Show garden by Hadlow College students Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams (we will, I am sure, be hearing more of these two in the not too distant future).

naturehut
Build a garden room out of things you find kicking around: Garden rooms are definitely au naturel this year. This one was on the sweet little Winnie the Pooh garden by Anthea Guthrie (one of my favourite designers): also spotted at the show were a cosy looking pod woven from willow on the City Twitchers summer garden, and a hobbit hole of a turf cave merging seamlessly into its surroundings on the Macmillan Legacy garden.

patio
Plant your patio: Simple but effective: pull out a paving slab or two from the patio and hey presto: instant planting opportunity. This one was breaking up the monotony of too much stone on the SABO: The Circle of Life garden.

pergola
Reinvent the pergola: It’s not compulsory to build your pergola out of wooden cross beams set on sturdy posts. This one was an old bit of mining kit (don’t ask me what bit but it did look impressively industrial) on the Green Seam garden.

pomegranate
Grow pomegranates: I suspect this one had had a little help to ripen quite this well in the UK: but you can dream. It was on the Turkish Garden of Paradise: and fruiting or not, the tree is lovely.

rose
Treat yourself to the Rose of the Year: I took quite a shine to the top rose for 2016, announced at the show as the next Rose of the Year has been for some time now. ‘Sunny Sky’ is a particularly fetching shade of yellow: hard to get right in the garden, but in this case spot on. It’s scented, too.

Hampton Court in pictures: New varieties

12 Saturday Jul 2014

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Agapanthus ‘Blueberry Cream’ from the Hoyland Plant Centre

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Crocosmia ‘Chrome Spray’ from Trecanna Nursery

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Eryngium ‘Neptune’s Gold’ from Hardy Plants: saw this one at Chelsea and still can’t make up my mind about it. That yellow foliage just looks… ill, somehow.

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Cotinus ‘Ruby Glow’ from Hilliers, celebrating their 150th anniversary.

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Dahlia ‘Bloom 50’, another new variety commemorating a special anniversary, this time the 50th birthday of the RHS’s Britain in Bloom

Postcard from Hampton Court: Perfect combinations

06 Friday Jul 2012

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Achillea ‘Anthea’ and Leucanthemum x superbum ‘Goldrauch’
Barnsdale Gardens, Rutland

Seline armeria, Geranium pratense ‘Violaceum’, Malva sylvestris ‘Zebrina’
The Botanic Nursery, Wiltshire

Achillea ‘Fanal’ and Salvia nemorosa ‘Ostfriesland’
Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants, Hampshire

Heuchera ‘Lime Marmalade’ and Selaginella apoda
Madrona Nursery, Kent

Cenolophium denudatum, Pilosella aurantiaca, Achillea ‘Walther Funcke’, and Anemanthele lessoniana
The Landform Garden, designed by Catherine MacDonald (gold, Best Summer Garden)

Postcard from Hampton Court: Of grey roses

05 Thursday Jul 2012

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I have a little ritual whenever I visit the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show: I visit the Roses and Romance marquee to have a look at the latest Rose of the Year.

I’m secretly in love with roses: I keep trying to give up growing them, as they’re far too romantical-like for my wellies-and-wasabi mental picture of myself as a gardener. But they keep wriggling back in somehow. I’m currently hatching a plan to sneak more in under the guise of being species roses, therefore having hips which are officially Useful.

Anyway: this year, it’s ‘You’re Beautiful’, bred by Graham Fryer: pic above. Very pink, very classic, rather handsome in a Barbara Cartland sort of way: this shade of candy pink isn’t quite my thing but I could see why it won.

However: while I was there I began to notice there is an ominous trend which is creeping into the rosey world. They’ve started breeding grey roses.
 

This is ‘Grey Dawn’: it’s the colour of faded curtains, or the dresses in BBC costume dramas, or maybe the papery skin of old ladies. This picture makes it look quite nice, but believe me, it’s grey.
I blame the recent unseemly race to breed a true blue rose: it produced a lot of roses they said were blue when in fact they were undeniably lilac. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was about the closest they got (even David Austin admits it’s purple, but ‘fades to slate blue’ with age). Here’s another one, ‘Blue for You’ (with apologies for the lack of focus):
 
See what I mean? Lilac.
Luckily the Japanese put an end to all that a few years ago with a bit of genetic engineering injecting a delphinium gene into a rose to make The Blue Rose (still think it’s a bit violet though). But the experiments have left their legacy.
As well as the grey roses, there are brown roses: a wave of washed-out colour that isn’t apricot and isn’t cream and isn’t anything, really. This one reminds me of a properly nice apricot (Apricot Silk, perhaps) smudged down with one of those blues or greys:


It’s ‘Julia’s Rose’: and it’s beige. I like it better than the grey one, but it’s definitely a meh sort of colour.

Part of the problem is that these colours are so hard to place in the border. One of my neighbours has ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ planted among a little mini rose garden outside her house (she’s elderly, so be nice). She’s bang up to date: but that’s the one rosebush that doesn’t look right. It’s weird, out of synch, the wrong colour for roses.

On the other hand, all this messing with what is good and right has had some positive side-effects. Once you go down the brown route, you reach a fork in the road: the poo option is clearly to be avoided, so obviously the only way is chocolate.

And this is where brown roses start to show why they should exist. Just look at this.

It’s ‘Hot Chocolate’, a sumptuous floribunda that justifies all the misguided breeding efforts in the world if the point of them was to lead to this. Yum, yum.

Postcard from Hampton Court: Carpet bedding is back

04 Wednesday Jul 2012

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The floral (well, green) clock on the wall of summer garden The Wheels of Time (Bronze)
Vertical planting… or carpet bedding?
Another green picture in the Low Cost High Impact garden Summer in the Garden (Silver)

Carpet bedding galore, and all exquisitely executed by the masters of the art at Bournemouth Borough Council’s show garden A Very Victorian Fantasy (Silver-gilt) 

Shed roof at The Garlic Farm (gold, and best exhibit in the Growing for Taste marquee)

And more edible carpet bedding, this time from Dobies: Pak choi ‘Chuchoi’ and ‘Rubi’ with quite the brightest marigolds I’ve ever seen

Postcard from Hampton Court: Conceptual

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’: Matthew Childs’ moving depiction of his journey from injury in the 7/7 bombing through to jacking in his job in advertising and starting a new life as a garden designer. It was the deserved winner of Best Conceptual Garden.

Walking through the industrial boards-and-corrugated iron structure, you start in a dark and dank tunnel lined with hummocks of Asplenium scolopendrium and moss: the parallels with the Underground are unnerving, and the ceiling was dripping when I was there so I started thinking of other claustrophobic, underground places like coalmines.

As you walk through, the gaps widen and the light creeps in: the old, worn, stained sleepers give way to new oak and the planting lightens to dancing Gaura lindheimeri and pretty Astrantia ‘Roma’ and ‘Buckland’ amid airy grasses. Thoughtful, detailed, lovely.

The Coral Desert, by Antonia Young (Silver-gilt)
I loved this, with its clever juxtapositions (the driest plants in the world – cacti and succulents – made to look just like underwater coral) drawing attention to the plight of the coral reefs. And the ceiling was a two-inch transparent tray of rippling water. How cool is that?

I admit I make a beeline for the Conceptual Gardens at Hampton Court. More challenging (and often better-executed) than the big show gardens, they’re edgy, interesting, thought-provoking.

They always break the rules: they make me perpetually re-think what I mean by the word ‘garden’. I’ve seen conceptual gardens that are upside down, under the ground, under water and inside boxes. Most don’t look like ‘gardens’ at all: and that’s why they’re so inspiring.

I’ve always thought that the fact that conceptual gardens are so popular is a tribute to the gardening public. It’s easy to think ‘most’ people who say they like gardening are just boringly traditional and set in their ways, growing veg in straight lines and lining their clipped lawns with bright pink rhododendrons.

And some are. But many – I would even venture to say ‘most’ – of those who take the trouble to go to a flower show are far more interesting, and interested than that. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who relish a challenge and want to garden in a more intelligent, creative way.

There are now conceptual spin-offs at Tatton Park and Chelsea: and they are attracting more crowds and more discussion than anything else.

So perhaps it’s not surprising the mainstream designers want a slice of the action: ideas first seen in conceptual gardens are slowly, surely creeping in to the mainstream and sparking other little flashes of inspiration. It keeps design alive, new, inspiring, moving forward: and that can be nothing but good.

Postcard from Hampton Court: Monday

02 Monday Jul 2012

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Sorry (again): another long silence.

I have been camera-less which has left me bereft and strangely incapable of wittering on as I usually do. Not sure why not having visible proof silences me quite so efficiently but luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view) another flower show came along forcing me to buck up my ideas and acquire a new camera post haste. Canon SX40, since you ask, and yes it is far more complicated than the last one and no I still haven’t got further than the auto setting.

The show, of course, was the wonderful RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show: huge, fizzing with energy and ideas, slightly exhausting, thought-provoking, unmissable.

The extraordinary garden in the picture is Anoushka Feiler’s ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’, which won a gold and Best in Show: and for me it stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Show gardens at Hampton Court can be a bit hit-and-miss: what Tony Smith was doing sticking plastic bottles on Arundo donax for Ecover I don’t know (his paving conceptual garden was a bit… mmmm… too). Still: at least they try to push the boundaries and do something different, even if it doesn’t always come off.

But Anoushka’s garden was pure gold: or rather pink. It was the most sensuous, feminine, diaphanous garden: passionate, loving, emotional. The idea behind it was quite simple: a bridge as a journey over hardship (more specifically, overactive bladder – but I did my best not to think about that too much as it just made me want to cross my legs. Click the link if you want to know more.)

Either side were great banks of lush ivies and ferns dripping down to the water – a gorgeous and practical use for vertical planting – on which was built a sumptuous hummocky grassland of pinks and greens over which floated airy honey locust trees (Gleditsia triacanthos ‘Elegantissima’).

I adored the planting: here Echinacea ‘Fatal Attraction’ (mysterious and other-worldly without its petals), Dicentra ‘King of Hearts’, Pennisetum setaceum ‘Rubrum’ and, I think, the feathery plumes of Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Pixie Fountain’.

We’ve seen Anoushka’s work before: she created last year’s upside-down conceptual garden, ‘Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky’. Another passionate creation, full of laughter and hope. I’m so glad she’s back for more: and I hope we see a lot more of her gardens in years to come.

Postcard from Hampton Court: Sunday

10 Sunday Jul 2011

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So… farewell then, Hampton Court.

It’s been a good one and will live on in the memory for its mega edible garden, for my money the best yet of the centrepieces replacing the old Daily Mail pavilion; and for its evocations of scenes as distant as an Afghan battlefield and as close as a chalk stream in Hampshire. Conceptual gardens broke out of their box and made a bid for the mainstream; and the small gardens reached a quality and integrity that will be hard to match in subsequent years.

But – as usual – the stars of the show were the plants. So as a final flourish here’s my last postcard, celebrating all that was wonderful in the Floral Marquee. Let’s do it all again next year.

Postcard from Hampton Court: Saturday

09 Saturday Jul 2011

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Canna ‘Cleopatra’

from Hart Canna, on their stall in the Plant Heritage marquee
One of several gorgeous cannas that caught my eye (also into my notebook went the water cannas with their slender spear-like leaves and vibrant flowers: ‘Endeavour’ was a particularly lovely soft red).

Keith and Christine Hayward have been working for years to eradicate the rampant canna virus, imported with stock from the Netherlands and now so widespread that almost every canna you buy ends up sickly, striped and puckered with disease (I once bought one from a Chelsea garden sell-off, in the days when they did such things, which looked lovely when purchased – only to succumb a few weeks later).

The Haywards however have taken the only responsible approach: take what little unaffected stock remains, and propagate that, developing a range of virus-free canna: probably the only ones in the country you can be pretty much absolutely sure won’t develop the disease.

I’ve followed their progress in this over several years, since they nearly went out of business because of the virus but pulled themselves back from the brink. So I was really pleased to see their stand in the Plant Heritage marquee, full of vividly-flowered cannas with stripes and striations only where they were meant to be. Huge congratulations to both Keith and Christine for their achievement: and it’s good to see cannas looking healthy again.