Electric Green

Ok, if you want serious gardening commentary look away now. This is how I think the Garden Media Guild Awards would look if it were iterated as a musical or rock opera. All events and personalities depicted are almost entirely fictional* (apart from 3 Men Went to Mow, clearly). Here is the outline and draft soundtrack** - I am now going away to work on the choreography. 'The Pub', Act 4... Garden Media Guild Awards – The Musical Act One The good and the great of the gardening media world awake . They dress uncommonly carefully, remove stray mud and have a coffee. There is a sense of anticipation , excitement even as they leave the house. On arrival they are greeted by a bowler-hatted gentleman and attend to the first business of the day – the GMG AGM. Votes are cast, more coffee is drunk, opinions shared. Onwards and upwards, say all. Act Two In a swirl of glittering society, a glass of pink champagne is pressed into the hands of our heroes. A sl...

I was talking to my botanical uncle about snowdrops the other day, in the context of bigging up our welsh garden. Turns out that my paternal grandmother put in all sorts of exciting things but he reckons that quite a lot have faded away – and anything that has any susceptibility to slugs just gets munched and won’t bulk up. Anyway, we have a niceish spread of Galanthus nivalis ,and some others which I have been told are probably G. elwesii (they have bigger, greyer leaves, apparently) although my uncle suggested they could just be from a different population of G nivalis, snowdrops being a heterogeneous bunch. I will go and have a closer look in the spring, but the flowering times are certainly different. I would like to get some interesting ones, but at the same time it would be a bit daft to splash out on slug food. We shall see. I had quite a party week last week, with the annual Garden Media Guild Awards in London. It has been blogged to death, so I will sum it up as glitteri...

Ingredients for a bouquet Back in the summer I went on a floristry course to Green and Gorgeous in Oxfordshire. Historically, I have not been at all keen on formal floristry. It seemed rigid and stuffy, coming up with arrangements that had names like ‘Orchid and Sphagnum on a Tortured Twig’. But at G&G they laid my demons to rest with an intensive day learning how to make fashionable naturalistic bouquets. Since then I have had little need to use these dark arts, but as the autumn colours intensified the floristry bug intensified too. Venturing out with the secateurs I acquired Pyracantha berries, bronze and gold forsythia leaves, soft grey goldenrod seedheads (cunningly stabilised with a blast of extreme-hold hairspray to stop the seeds dropping off), and some Sedum flowers. I bought some Physalis and cellophane from Lulu Flowers round the corner – where they also gave me a quick refresher in wrapping them for travel. So, with much garden wire and raffia, I assemb...