Highlights from Gardeners' World Live

Last Friday MOH and I headed to Birmingham for this year’s Gardeners’ World Live show which celebrated 100 years of the BBC. I was given free tickets to the show and will be sharing more of the gardens and displays, but here I’m sharing my highlights from our visit.

We started our visit in the Floral Marquee, which was full of exhibits, plants and people - every sense was awakened as you stepped inside. Thankfully though there was also a healthy breeze, which was very welcome inside. There were a number of special features here to celebrate the BBC’s centenary year - and I’ve included a couple in this post - but there’s more to come.

The vegetable displays always fill me with awe - the giant onions caught our attention, but it was the loofahs (to the left of them) that were the real talking point. We’re not the only ones to be fascinated by them, as you may have seen that Monty Don is also growing some in his greenhouse this year - I’m looking forward to seeing how he gets on.

We admired the eucalyptus, the carnivorous plants, alliums and more including the most beautiful acers - the colours were amazing.

The special features showcased popular BBC programmes, including a Pebble Mill inspired display designed by Peter Seabrook, who passed away earlier this year. The display was brought to life as a tribute to him and his long-running association with BBC Gardeners’ World Live, pays homage to the Pebble Mill at One show, which was filmed in Birmingham and hosted by Peter from 1975 until 1986.

As we walked around the floral marquee we didn’t know which way to head next, it seemed each display was calling us off our intended route around the space. Just like a garden which pulls you in different ways, calling you to explore it freely.

My final photo from the marquee also has something I’m sure you’ll recognise…

Outside we wandered along looking at the show gardens, spotting Joe Swift posing for photos in the Memories of Mountains Garden Retreat designed by Jonathan King, which was awarded a Silver Merit.

The Marshalls Food for Thought Garden had a garden shed and incredibly neat brassicas - something I can only aspire to!

Design inspiration

I particularly liked the raised borders in the Metamorphosis garden, with its “inlaid caterpillar pebbles” but when I pointed them out to MOH, I got the look that said not to be getting too many ideas!

Over in the Beautiful Borders section I was also very taken with the cork pathway in the Living the Wild Life garden by Charlotte Jones. I think we’ve probably got a good collection of corks already, and you know, I’m willing to put in more work to make sure we’ve enough to cover a decent sized area.

The Pretty Wild Beautiful Border showed how you can encourage more wildlife into your garden in ‘a classy and stylish way’ by selecting plants and a colour scheme to fit a garden’s style. I’m a big fan of corten steel in gardens, so this one was always going to be one of my highlights.

The other border that really caught my eye was this one titled Equatorial Suburbia, which incorporates plants you wouldn’t normally expect to see in a suburban space, and does it so well.

One of my favourite parts of the show is the School Wheelbarrow Competition which this year celebrates the arrival of the Commonwealth Games to Birmingham, with a theme of Commonwealth Countries in a Barrow!

My show highlight: Frances’ Garden

And I wasn’t the only one, this garden won the Best Show Garden & Showcase Garden Platinum Award Winner. It’s designed by Frances Tophill and has sustainability at its heart, inspired by the Bauhaus era of the 1920s when the BBC was formed alongside the naturalistic planting, lush greenery and rewilded areas supporting wildlife.

It wasn’t surprising that each time we walked past there was a queue of people wanting to get a closer look.

It’s easy to see why isn’t it?

Thank you to the BBC Gardeners’ World Live team who provided MOH and I tickets to attend this year’s show.

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Tulip fever

This spring no doubt you’ll have seen me share pictures of one or two tulips here and on my social channels, and I’m very grateful to organised me who last autumn, not only bought bulbs but also planted them. Or most of them anyway. I found another packet in the greenhouse last week which didn’t quite make it into a pot - well there’s always this year for those…

But the ones that did make it into pots, bloomed and bloomed and brought a very welcome pop of colour to our garden, so this post is sharing those, and celebrating them. I planted them in large plastic flowerpots, so that the plastic pots could be easily lifted out of the terracotta pots once they’d finished flowering - this worked out well and is something I’d do again and recommend.

From inside the house it was great to get the pops of colour and to watch them change colours, and then one day they were gone. Their petals dropped completely, but soon to be replaced by the alliums. Given my success with the tulips I had high hopes for the alliums, but it was not to be. My ‘old faithfuls’ - the alliums that flower on the patio flowered as they usually do, but the ones in pots were sadly disappointing. They flowered but were floppy small heads, rather than the brilliantly bold spheres I’d been hoping for - next year maybe!

The tulips also worked out well as we put our house on the market at the end of March and so it was good to have some colour in the garden, and for it not to be “just green” which has been MOH’s observation in years gone by.

These pots were further up the garden, so not visible from the house, and every time without fail I walked past these the colour gave me a surprise - it shouldn’t have, but it did. So there really is something in that saying about not being able to see your whole garden from a single vantage point.

The detail on the petals was fantastic and I couldn’t resist playing with the contrast and colour editing tools a little, well quite a lot - the background foliage is a little on the purple side!

Hopefully I’ll remember to be just as organised this autumn!

A new light

Last month at Grand Designs Live we found another light to admire and lust after. And this wasn’t any old light, though it probably is a pretty old one. It’s a style of light that we’ve looked at for a long time, and always put on the ‘one day’ list. Turns out the one day turned out to be last month, and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve said before, and I stand by it - the Design Arcade is one of my favourite areas of the show. It’s a single walkway, a corridor through the show which is jam-packed of great stuff. There’s inspiration each side of you, and we often walk up and down here at least a couple of times, each time seeing something new.

Therefore at the show in May, it wasn’t unexpected for us to stop and admire the lights on the Albert & Edward stand, in fact I’d have been more surprised if we didn’t stop and linger for a while. Many of the customised lights caught our eye, and I’ve a feeling at some point we’ll be looking to buy a memory wall light, and actually it was that which got us talking to Duncan.

One of the memory wall lights included an old metal boxed puncture repair kit, similar to one that we’d come across whilst sorting through my FILs garage recently. I’ve a bit of a thing about tins, and knowing that MOH doesn’t share this, I’d slipped the old-fashioned tin into one of the boxes we brought home. He remembered the tin from his childhood and wished he’d kept it - ta dah - good news, I had. These memory boards won’t be for everyone, but when they can include your own memories, then that would make them even better.

But anyway, our new light. It’s the one on the right above. We admired it and carried on wandering around the show, but this time knowing that if we get the place we’re after it will fit perfectly. It’s dangerous to make purchases for properties you don’t yet own, so we needed a plan b - and with viewings on our own home continuing we needed somewhere for it to go that made sense.

We pondered it some more and realised with a bit of light rearrangement we could make this work, so headed back to the stand again and made the purchase. Duncan kindly agreed to drop the light off either on his way back or soon after, which MOH was very happy with as carrying it back on the Jubilee line didn’t really appeal.

It’s been in place in our conservatory for a few weeks now, and it looks great.

Thanks Duncan, it was great to meet and chat with you. I’m pretty sure we’ll be down to the shop at Whitstable at some point, especially now we have a potential customised memory wall light vacancy on our ‘one day’ list!