On 27 August 2022 I won a silver cup! For the first time in my life! At the Kew Horticultural Society’s 77th Flower & Produce Show. (Cue the Archers’ theme tune).
Always held on the Saturday of the August bank holiday weekend, the show is a Kew institution and takes place on the smaller Kew Green, across the South Circular Road from St Ann’s Church. As detailed in the ‘Rules for Exhibitors’ I staged my three entries on the evening before the show. I was only the 3rd exhibitor to enter the large marquee furnished with white paper covered trestle tables. I was given one card per entry on which I wrote the number of the class of the entry and my name. I then found the relevant section of the tables and set out my exhibits, the card name side down. My original intention had been to enter the ‘Montello’ plum tomatoes which cropped really well in this summer’s heat. But I realised when I inspected them earlier that week that I’d already picked and eaten the largest and juiciest! Reading through the rules on the Society’s website, I identified some categories to enter and spent an hour or so on the Friday afternoon assembling my offerings. Which were:
Class 34. GRAPES 2 bunches grown outdoors. In 2020 I planted a grapevine (Vitis vinifera ‘Lakemont’) in a large terracotta pot and trained it across the south facing fence at the back of the garden. This is a seedless dessert grape and this year, like the tomatoes, it soaked up the sunshine and produced a couple of dozen bunches of rather small but intensely sweet grapes.
Class 44. PERENNIALS hardy, 3 or more different kinds in a vase or bowl. Opting for the informal look, I picked a couple of stems of five different flowers and popped them into a half pint milk bottle from the 1960s, embossed with ‘Lord Rayleigh’s Dairies’, which I keep on the kitchen windowsill and use for roses and sweet peas or cuttings waiting to be potted up. These are the flowers I picked:
- Anaphalis margaritacea var. yedoensis: ‘Yedoan pearly everlasting flower’. I bought this in May 2021 from the wonderful nursery at Great Dixter. It is also grown in the cutting garden at Osterley. In the sunny position where it’s planted at the far right hand end of my garden, its foliage blends really well with the similarly greyish leaves of the late summer flowering shrub Caryopteris × clandonensis, whose mid blue flowers are just emerging this week.
- Salvia x jamensis Nachtvlinder. The velvety deep purple flowers contrasted well with the white everlasting flowers. This plant came from Kew Gardens about ten years ago whilst I was working there, when they dismantled the planting of the outline of a giant man which had been created at the foot of the Pagoda as part of a summer festival.
- Salvia uligonosa. ‘Bog sage’. Sky blue flowers top 2 metre high stems. Arguably too tall for my tiny garden, but at this time of year it flowers profusely and helps create a slightly jungly, overgrown atmosphere.
- Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ or Hon Jobs as they’re referred to in the nursery trade. I mentioned in my last blog that they’ve struggled a little to reach their usual 1-1.5 metre height, but thankfully there were plenty of the creamy white flowers to spare for my arrangement.
- Verbena bonariensis added to the cottagey feel I was aiming for.
Class 61. FUCHSIAS a vase of mixed varieties or one variety. I picked several sprays of Fuchsia ‘Burning Embers’ which I’ve grown in a medium sized pot for about four years after buying it in a plant sale at Osterley. I cut it down to a low framework of woody stems after it finishes flowering and for months it looks as if it will never recover until during April new shoots appear and by midsummer it’s developed into a neat dome covered in a mass of dainty maroon bells.
I returned to the show marquee the following afternoon with a friend, Liz, a fellow local gardener. Naturally, I was curious to see if any how my entries had fared under the judges’ scrutiny. Nul points for the grapes: the top three entries were wonderfully plump and juicy. But I was awarded second prize for the hardy perennials (3 points)- I was delighted, even when I noticed there were only two entries on display! The winner’s arrangement of Salvia Amistad was stunning. Turning to the table where I’d placed the vase of Fuchsias the evening before I was so excited to see a red rosette to indicate that I’d won First prize (4 points).
It was fun looking at all the beautiful fruit and vegetables entered in competition, as well as cakes, bread and crafts. Leaving the marquee, we walked around the stalls representing local organisations and selling crafts and plants and had tea and cake. And lovely chats with our respective clients, several of whom were enjoying the show and the sunny afternoon too. About to leave the show ground, I heard my name announced and was just in time to be presented with a handsome silver cup by Giles Fraser, the new vicar of St Ann’s. I had won the Kew Challenge Cup ‘for the first-time exhibitor gaining the most points in horticultural classes 1-64’.
The cup is in pride of place on the mantelpiece for the next 12 months and naturally I’m already planning which classes to enter into the 78th show in a year’s time.
