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  • 2010
    • July
      • YESSSSSS We won Chelsea gold
        07/17/10
        GOLD
        The win, and raising awareness about problems faced by the indigenous people of the Cameroon rainforest, made the slog worth it... even working seven months without a weekend. You can read about some of it on http://bakagarden.wordpress.com/.
        And as soon as I get a break from my ne

    • January
      • Erotic garden talks
        01/17/10
        I'll be talking about Erotic Gardens on Friday February 5th at Middle Temple (all proceeds to Malawi Dream, tickets from malawi_dream@me.com) and March 12 and 19 in Oxford. The Oxford gigs are also fund raisers, one for a new homeless charity working with the Burford Garden Company. Probably

      • Erotic Talk
        01/16/10
        Lusciously lean James Alexander Sinclair has been in touch to tell me about The Guardian's sexy gardens piece yesterday. Garden filth is a particular favourite of mine. Contact me if you'd like to come to one of the Erotic Gardens talks I'm giving, for charity, in Oxford and London.

  • 2009
    • August
      • Kim Wilkie: heaven and picturesque hell
        08/16/09
        Teetered in from the official opening of Kim Wilkie’s new landscape ‘Orpheus’, dripping mud and rain across rolling floorboards at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Orpheus is an elegant turf pit (above, behind Kim) representing the eponymous hero's journey into the underworld - in landscaping

    • July
      • Qui vivat atque floreat ad plurimos annos
        07/24/09

        The eagle-nosed garden god and spelling bee champion James Alexander Sinclair (pictured here swapping ears with Ann-Marie Powell) has jiggled and joggled his ASCII-to-hex chart, primped and preened his sprocket retainer bolts and come up with an even shiner website. The blog's good, too

      • Heroic rosearian
        07/24/09
        Sir Hardy Amies, the Rosa Mundi nutter, war hero and Queen's couturier would have been 100 last Friday and, in celebration, David Freeman had a lunch at Hardy's Gloucestershire garden where the last of the Rosa mundi are just going over. His garden looks lovelier than ever now that its c

      • Lily
        07/06/09
        Lake swimming last night. Water lily flowers tight shut. Vast pike leaps out of the water lily pads beside me.

        Now I will stick to admiring my own mini lilies, by day, from my pike-free garden.

      • Cool thoughts
        07/01/09
        although I am too hot to think. Writing about no-chemical swimming pools is heating instead of cooling my brain. And I cannot remember the name of this plant.

        I'm told that it seeds everywhere. I was told that about Nicotiana sylvestris and I can't manage to get it to flower

    • June
      • Cancer unit bike ride
        06/13/09
        Completed the cycle ride round Oxford to raise money for the Jane Ashley cancer unit. Very easy to donate: www.justgiving.com/isiscyclists. OK, not very challenging ride. 13 miles. Except that we were led but someone who is having her final chemo session today. What a star.
        This is such a gr

      • Monkey
        06/05/09
        So the Garden Monkey has an infallible Champagne Tracker Device too - just like the Hort Week team. Why wasn't s/he at the Future Gardens Laurent-Perrier trough yesterday? Maybe s/he was.

      • Future Gardens
        06/05/09

        Tony Heywood's thing. Some people were comparing it to Niki de Saint Phalle's stuff. No way.


        Bruno Marmiroli's tree through coal.Followed by: classic Ivan Hicks; golden dog turds (odd, even for FG);sitting hole in Hugo Bugg & Maren Hallenga's modestly

      • Garden History Society bash at the Geffrye Museum
        06/03/09
        Il Presidente Dominic demonstrating the Mexican Cough.
        2 The Hort Week mob proving that their Champagne Tracker Device is infallible.
        3 Matthew Appleby shortly before he throttled Bob Sherman to get Garden Organic's Guru to spill the Green beans.
        4 Nice gate
        5 The world&

      • Cardinal Vaughan
        06/01/09

        The Cardinal reminds me of Blake's Sick Rose picture

        Not that this tree peony star he is sick. He started waving his finery around just before Chelsea after six years twiddling his thumbs and refusing to flower much despite sitting in a pot of my finest Chateau Owen compost.
    • May
      • Challenge: how would you define ‘garden’?
        05/27/09
        Ian came up with some definitions of a garden. Which is brave because no one has managed a decent definition- ever. And it’s been a while since Adam and Eve started the garden business.
        Adam and Eve were too busy eating apples to define where they were but we British should have come up with

      • So: is it possible to have a garden without plants?
        05/27/09

        Stephen suggested that, if a plot lacks plants, it's a question of, ‘Come into the Installation Maude’
        Lila Das Gupta talked about Gardens Without Plants in terms of shock jock stuff.

      • Flying high
        05/27/09
        Was the evening becoming tired and emotional when OE artist/ceramicist Jonathan Garratt www.jonathangarratt.com suggested planting up either side of airport runways to make ‘accelerated gardens’? These are gardens designed to be viewed at twenty miles an hour or whatever it takes for a Ryanair jet

      • Fashion rap
        05/27/09

        Professor Caroline Evans from Central St Martins brought a whole new angle to the party. She enjoys pursuing gardens - catching up with them as they change. Like the Pursuit of Happiness I suppose. She presented us with Plant-free Garden equivalents from her world. Apparently one fashion co

      • Design speak
        05/27/09
        Andrew Fisher Tomlin, who helped pull this debate together, has been hired by the RHS to tutor the Shows Department in design speak. Good thinking. Cuts down misunderstandings. Maybe this new urge to communicate properly will avoid future appearances of dreary plots like the Plastercine garden.

      • Plant free
        05/27/09

        It was Ian, staunch defender of the RHS - that hallowed heaven of all things horticultural - who said that we should broaden our horizons and not reject a garden without plants. Blimey. Post-Chaucerian treble negative apart I enjoyed this radical sentiment from the editor of The Garden.
      • ThinkinGardens in the Coach and Horses
        05/27/09

        The Coach and Horses is an innocuous name for the Soho pub where reputations and livelihoods are regularly made and destroyed. Jeffrey Barnard was regularly unwell here along with Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. And then there were the Private Eye lunches.

        Which is

      • Hats off to Chelsea
        05/24/09

        Tom Hoblyn's Iris and pitcher plants
        Prowling round the gardens after hours on Wednesday with Lila Das Gupta, the Royal Horticultural Society’s Hayley Monkton (who appears looking blonde and gorgeous on the RHS Chelsea website), Bob Sweet and other luminaries I fell back in love wit

      • James May love gardens but it doesn't show. Plus Monkey
        05/24/09
        Clever RHS - taking on the Plastercine garden with all the attendant publicity driven by Top Gear Presenter James May http://www.topgear.com/us/the_show/bios/james_may. And then justifying the otherwise unjustifiably non-living garden by awarding a Plastercine medal. Just one criticism of the oth

      • Chelsea RudeBoy
        05/24/09
        Roy Lancaster, that gentle, adorable plantsman whose passion for trees makes me want to buy a field and get planting, was giving a talk in the Gardening Matters tent. An elderly gentleman in the front row got up to go. Roy made a cheery comment - but the ‘gentleman’ answered with a rude gesture.

      • Caressing thyme at Cheslea
        05/24/09

      • Julian Dowle, Lila and the missing Ann-Marie
        05/24/09
        Julian Dowle, Chelsea veteran, judge and winner of countless gold medals with Lila Das Guptas, BBC Chelsea star and I crept into this hut to escape the razzmatazz outside.

        I wish Ann-Marie Powell had been able to join us but Gilbert Bundy prevented her appearance at Chelsea and, at a fe

      • Chelsea at sea with the Cayman Islands
        05/22/09
        The clear picture shows the Cayman Islands’ gold winning exhibit of an undersea garden. The blob shows my uncategorized underwater photograph of a Cayman Reef.


        This is the Cayman Islands’ second ever garden at Chelsea so the gold is not at all bad. In fact it’s a miracle they agre

      • Most popular Chelsea designer?
        05/20/09
        Biggest numbers by far, with some having to watch on the monitors outside the Gardening Matters forum tent, were for Sarah Eberle’s talk. Sarah http://www.saraheberle.com/ is the pixie-like star of Hampton Court and Chelsea with the energy of a nuclear reactor. This year, with six week’s notice, s

      • Chelsea Ulf Nordfell
        05/20/09
        Ulf Nordfell, this year’s king of Chelsea, strolls in with a posse of sleek-looking Swedes. They are staying at the Swedish Embassy which sounds swish until he tells me that it’s full of Ikea furniture. I wonder if our diplomatic outposts are furnished from Homebase.
        Tricky moment when sound

      • Chelsea wednesday James Alexander Sinclair Mark Gregory and Ian Dexter
        05/20/09
        Gorgeous pouting (GP) James Alexander Sinclair, author of outstanding garden blogs for the BBC and himself http://web.me.com/blackpittsgarden/Site as well as being a famous, fabulous person, is co-chairing Chelsea’s Gardening Matters forum with me today.
        Mark Gregory and Ian Dexter are first

      • Chelsea rosearian
        05/19/09

        The great rosearian Michael Marriot is the next speaker. He reminds me about my love affair with roses. Years, ago when I bought my first David Austin roses, I reckoned that they were fashionable but useless but now….I would not be without their voluptuous scent and petals. And I certainly

      • Rowse-ing finale
        05/19/09
        Treck back to Oxford, shattered, to see a late showing of Oliver Rowse’s bizarre and brilliant 'Udder' at the Burton Taylor Theatre http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/BurtonTaylor/ . He is 20 and a name to watch. His show’s a sell out til Saturday – a few tickets left at I write.

      • Wayne Hemingway
        05/19/09
        First up is Wayne Hemingway http://www.hemingwaydesign.co.uk/. What a star. Why isn’t he better listened to? If local authorities and the government gave his housing scheme designs the attention they deserve we’d have a happier little island and far less crime and grimness. His methods are prove

      • Chelsea collision
        05/19/09
        Now I am shattered. First day of the Chelsea Gardening Matters forum. It started three years ago and I’ve chaired every year. This year the Royal Horticultural Society’s Bob Sweet has put two of us in per day to chair it. Today I am with Wesley Kerr.

        The first time we met was in 2004

      • Patrick Blanc and the plant that nearly decapitated Tim
        05/18/09
        Run away to the Athenaeum Hotel on Piccadilly http://www.athenaeumhotel.com/ to drink champagne with one of my garden heros, Patrick Blanc http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/ and watch as Tim Richardson is nearly decapitated by a flying plant. It has been dislodged from the top Patrick’s stu

      • Chelsea saint
        05/18/09
        Come across Paul Stone, Eden Project garden’s designer surrounded by some of the prisoners and homeless people who are creating this show garden. This is the stage where every designer is tired, anxious and bad tempered but, as one of his gardening ingénues, drags a hose pipe across about 100 plant

      • Chelsea Cough
        05/18/09

        Chelsea Cough’s been worse than ever this year. Plane trees dominate the site and chuck down pollen that sandpapers eyes and makes victims cough and choke. It’s blocked the filters on James Wong’s Canary Islands garden. Mind you, The Cough is nothing beside the other complaints brought on

      • Chelsea Monday
        05/18/09
        Long chat with Ulf Nordfell on Monday as he tweaked and tickled his iris, stachys and pinkly scented Rosa X odorata ‘Mutabilis’ hours before his garden was awarded best in show. It’s the simplicity of his and all the other award winning gardens this year that appeals. But his inspiration is comple

  • 2008
    • June
      • Cottesbrooke
        06/29/08
        This weekend marks the first Cottesbrooke plant fair in Northamptonshire. Cleve West, James Alexander Sinclair, Camilla Swift and Phillippa May snuffling around the stalls. A lot of Chlesea Flower Show refusnics are exhibiting. High quality stuff. Chiltern Seeds ...heavenly unusual plants. Woot