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Bear with me - this is not the usual 'all royalties are theft' complaint. I don't really object to people earning royalties from introducing a new plant. The sums are usually pennies per plant so the actual royalty cost makes no material difference to the retail
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Somehow I knew that Southport Flower Show was the right place to take a first, tentative dip into the murky waters of floral marquee exhibiting. And so it proved to be. With around 80,000 visitors the show is not much smaller than Tatton and the quality of exhibitors is
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There is a definite post-Tatton buzz about the place this week. Visitor numbers and plant sales are up, which is good. Several people have told me directly that they went to Tatton Show, saw the show garden and decided to visit us as a result. This is even better -
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By popular request, some new pictures of 'Grasses with Grace'... And a link to my guest blog on the BBC Gardening website on summer flowering grasses
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What a difference a day makes. On Monday morning my willing finishing team and I were holed up in our little marquee shletering from the rain, frustrated and bored, peering at the sky and hoping we would get just two dry hours to finish off. On Tuesday afternoon I was
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By way of an diary update: Saturday: Heavy downpours but enough dry spells to get on. Pushed on hard to finish planting up two of the three remaining areas. But by 4pm it was raining and miserable and I ran out of steam. More than that, I completely ground to
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This is going to be a quick, one topic blog post. I have spent the last 10 days at Tatton Park, building a show garden, 'Grasses with Grace'. The garden was conceived about 9 months ago, centred on an idea of ornamental grasses with a sculpture. It was
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On Friday afternoon I loaded the van with some of my best looking plants, drove to Arley Hall just up the road and began setting up a small plant stall at Arley's Garden Festival. It took two more round trips in my little van to deliver enough plants
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Sedums, you're thinking? Why trouble yourself to write about propagating sedums - it's just so easy? Well yes it easy. In fact it's so easy you may be making life more tricky than it is. You could take a standard cutting - cut just
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I love propagating plants. Actually that's something of an understatement - at this time of year it's more of an obsession. The garden and nursery are heaving with potential cuttings material and the seed harvest is taking off in earnest. I hardly know where to start.
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Our much loved friend Greg invited us to join his 40th birthday celebrations near Bergerac, France this weekend and in a moment of rare conviviality we gritted our teeth, gave Michael O'Leary £36, and jumped on a plane from Liverpool on Friday morning leaving the nursery in the
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The longer it is between posts on this blog, the harder it is to decide what to write about. It's tempting simply to post a list of things I've been doing by way of catching up, and to justify my absence. But that would be dull.