Hello Everyone,
Here is our life of fantasy. The garden as most of you know, won gold, and its bright California wildflowers attracted these esteemed visitors like bees to honey. We spent 16 days making the garden with a team of 8, many of which we had worked with before. The site was dry, hard packed rubble from 6 weeks of no rain. As soon as work started on the garden it started to rain and was cold and miserable as only an English May can be. The show grounds turned into a collective mire of mud. Work continued unabated and the only refuge was the greasy food truck that served various glops over french fries (chips), and tea. And, yes, real men drink tea over here. The toilets had seats that were unattached and before you could use them, you had to pick up the seats from the ground and place them on the toilet. One had to perch just so in order not to have them slide off!
We had the help of a small backhoe for our garden that was invaluable to dig holes, move soil and loosen the rubble. We stayed until 7:30 each night, or even later for the first 8 days, so were well ahead of schedule. Many of the other gardens had lots of intricate hardscape that took endless amounts of time to finish, leaving the planting to be rushed in the end. In the majority of the gardens, hardscape seems to figure more than plants, and comes with lots of straight lines that ran either parallel or perpendicular to the site, and whose spaces are filled with plants. A Swedish garden had the same formula with diagonal lines. There were virtually no curves in any of the gardens. Most of these gardens were well behind in the end and had to have gruesome work hours to 9:30 each night. Some worked until midnight, then took a 4 hour break and came back at 4 am. A number of the gardens ordered 50% more plants than they needed and these formed walls of vegetation in front of the gardens until they were done planting, obscuring the view. Most of the gardens teams were very friendly in brief bursts, and some have become our friends.
Our garden of weeds and wildflowers has virtually no straight lines and forms a narrative with its old barn (that many call a shed here! Apparently all barns have been converted into houses, so perhaps if we furnished it with a sofa and kitchen, it would be identified correctly), windmill, ponds that flow into one another, and of course, the lovely wildflowers. Most people here, with the exception of visitors from south Africa, Australia and Barbados, don't know what a windmill is, and what it does. This and the idea that the barn is a shed, makes interpretation necessary. However, the bank of California wildflowers is like a chorus singing loudly, and has attracted a multitude of bees and hoverflies sipping the exotic nectar and charms people to no end. People's comments are: "It's so uplifting!", "I feel like bursting into tears!", "I want to live there," "If you are going to be busy, you must be very busy. This garden does it perfectly," "What a change from all those depressing blues and purples," "It is joyous," and of course, "It is the best garden here!" The garden has been on the Telly, (as they say here), a number of times and people were particularly enchanted with the segment from California at the Eleven Roses Ranch. Many people comment on how affected they were by the story of the symbiosis of the cattle and the wildflowers.
We have been busy day and night since we started and have had many wonderful house guests and visitors to the garden from home and here, besides the people you see pictured here. We will regret leaving our lovely flat, whose aspect on the corner of 5 small streets coming together makes it feel like a ship sailing into the city. There are lots of skirmishes between buses, Rolls Royces and taxis, and sometimes the army exercising their gorgeous horses. Once a huge crowd of roller bladers with a giant boom box rolled by. The home of the London philharmonic is only 3 blocks away, and we have seen a number of concerts. This is one of the fanciest areas of London and the street is lined with stores that Americans would have to sell off the ancestral home in order to shop there. Supermarkets have lots of exotic organic foods like jersey milk Madagascar vanilla bean yogurt. There are lots of great newspapers with uninhibited news about America. We have learned more here about what is happening than at home.
The garden and show ground are mobbed from 8am to 8 pm. It has been very hot 25C, and all of us are wilting, having become completely unacclimated.
Many of the fancy stores in the neighborhood are decorated with flowers outside, and floral wear to celebrate the show. Tickets, 157,000 of them, are sold out. What a great country!
Kate .
