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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 proven and, frankly, you don’t need to be a social scientist to work out why. His schemes give people lovely places to live with outside space where action and community spirit thrive alongside the plants and trees. It’s a no brainer given to us by someone with burgeoning grey matter and conviction.
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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 when I was presenting BBC2’s Gardens Through Time. We were filming at Chelsea. My director had told me to walk and talk in one direction, his director had told him to walk and talk in….a collision course. Neither of us saw the other coming and BANG we crashed.
This time we find a more collaborative way to work one on stage and the other cheer leading from the floor.
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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 stunning new planting on the outside walls of this otherwise lumpen building. Well, there’s a high wind. Tim, showing sang froid worthy of Queen Victoria, simply picks up the plant tries to replant it in the hotel’s window box. I bring Patrick over and tell him what’s just happened. Patrick is alarmed and says to Tim:‘Be careful – that is a very special plant.’
Patrick is a consummate plantsman
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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 plants, cracking stems as he does so, Paul breaks our conversation for a moment, says a gentle ‘excuse me’ to the miscreant and moves the hose away from the plants. This pic shows Dean Stalham the ex prisoner turned poet who wrote on Eden's wood henge.
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