RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015, part 1

June 30, 2015 Andrew OBrien

They could at least have turned the fountains on for me

I have been fortunate enough to have spent the past two days at Hampton Court, helping Fibrex Nurseries to set up in the Floral Marquee on Sunday (another gold winning display for them, hurrah!), and attending press day on Monday. 2015 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Show at Hampton Court. This is a truly stunning location, bisected by the the Long Water with its fountains, spanned by four pontoons, with the royal palace forming the focal point at the end. No matter how warm it gets – and, to my memory, Hampton Court is always hot and sunny (clearly I’ve blocked out the rainy years) – there’s always a cool breeze by the water, and a shady spot to sit beneath the lime trees which flank it in avenues on either bank, an ideal place to pause and to mull over the many things to see during the day.

This year the Show has been organised into three zones: Grow, Inspire and Feast (or respectively, Plants, Gardens, and Grub, if I was in charge of things. Fortunately for the RHS, I’m not). The first of these, the Grow zone, consists of the plant village, Floral Marquee and Plant Heritage areas, and here you’ll find wonderful plants, details of national collections and a wealth of expertise generously given from many of the best nurseries in the UK. You could easily spend your entire visit here, but just over the water the Inspire zone beckons, playing host to the show gardens and the trade stands, the Festival of Roses marquee and the Country Living pavilion. Further up the path from the smaller Summer Gardens you enter the Feast zone. Initially, I’ll admit I felt a little disgruntled. In the past this whole section has been given over to small gardens, so to discover that half of them had been replaced with cafes and restaurants could give the impression that the horticultural and design aspects of the show are being dumbed down in favour of commercial considerations. However, there’s more to Feast than eateries – the presence of the the Cookery Theatre and a full programme of talks from speakers including Alys Fowler, James Wong and Greg Wallace indicates that the RHS are looking to ramp up their evangelical efforts concerning the link between plot and plate, which can only be a good thing. On Monday, I narrowly missed a demonstration given to a group of schoolchildren by Raymond Blanc in the children’s community garden of Henri Le Worm (I would have loved to have attended, but couldn’t quite tear myself away from the plants in the Floral Marquee).

One final general note before I get on to specifics, which I record here largely for my own benefit in the hope that it might also be useful for someone else. Navigation is a big issue for me around the showground – on past visits I’ve lost my bearings and only discovered a huge section just before I was due to leave. It really helps to carry a map of the Show with you, but if you don’t fancy paying almost a fiver for the catalogue in which it appears (much of which is available for free on the RHS’s excellent website), then use your phone to take a photo of one of the free-standing maps along the main route. Without a map, the rule of thumb is this – if you’ve not yet made your way over the water and to the opposite gate to the one by which you entered, you haven’t seen all there is to see. (Coming from the car park end via the Long Water Gate, the place where I would invariably get confused is a little choke point at the lower end of the Summer gardens, which takes you through an avenue of trees before opening out into an area leading down towards the conceptual gardens and the Thames Gate.)

Onto the gardens. There are over thirty in all over four categories, show, historical, conceptual and summer gardens. Here is a taste of those that made the biggest impact on me.

Green roofed wheelie bins and permeable paving on the Community Street

The Community Street, designed by Nigel Dunnett, illustrates the current RHS campaign, Greening Grey Britain, which is promoting the use of plants to enliven the hard, grey areas of our towns and cities, transforming unloved areas of harsh concrete and paving into healthy, productive and engaging spaces for the whole community. As housing density increases and our natural green space is eroded, this is a vital initiative if we’re to preserve our wellness and sanity in an increasingly crowded world, and I’ve been keen to see how the issues are addressed at the show.

All rather grey on the Community Street

You enter the space through a recreation of a very grey, rather unloved street in Bristol, complete with abandoned car, litter and a fridge in one of the front gardens. Wall art depicts three of the main issues with our grey city space – rainwater runoff and consequent flooding, the urban heat island effect, and particulate pollution of the air. The garden goes on to demonstrate – with many information boards and an army of keen planty evangelists – how an informed use of horticulture coupled with appropriate hard landscaping can combat each of these problems.

Detail from the Community Street

Plenty of places for bugs and bees to set up home on the Community Street

Wildlife friendly hawthorn hedge and log piles on the Community Street

The planting here was magnificently bold, dense and rich, and if Nigel Dunnett takes the props for coming up with the ideas, then great credit must also go to Kitty Wilkins and her army of volunteers for implementing the intricately detailed plans.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

The Macmillan Legacy Garden is the gentlest tour-de-force. Ann-Marie Powell has created a tranquil, edge-of-woodland space, lush foliage and white birch bark contributing to a soothing pallet of greens and whites – which just happen to be the sponsor's primary brand colours, also including copper/apricot tones from their secondary pallet in the planting, for example with the verbascums and the russet tones in the epimedium foliage.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

As a response to the turbulent and emotional journey followed by any family whose life has been touched by cancer, it’s a perfect place in which to seek sanctuary, to pick your way through the plants across the ribbons of water which weave through the paving, past the avenue of birches with their seating, and across the stepping stones to the seclusion offered by the softly rounded structure whose surface has been planted with ivies and ferns and other woodland plants.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

A lush and slightly sinister note is introduced by the arisaemas, and perhaps even the gunnera has a slightly spikey, other-worldly feel which suggests elements of confusion and uncertainty. Maybe it’s easy to read too much into the individual choices of plants, but the overall effect manages to be at the same time soothing and stimulating. Just the kind of place I'd like to wander in, lost in thought.

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

It was interesting to see my old college represented, Hadlow’s ‘Green Seam’ garden, designed by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams winning Best in Show. This garden presents us with an allegory of how horticulture can play a part in improving the lives of those living in areas of social and economical deprivation, mirroring the work of the Hadlow Group with the Betteshanger Sustainable Parks initiative seeking to bring regeneration to the ex-mining community near Deal in east Kent. Big business and politics, rather than grassroots gardening, but it was encouraging to see the designers illustrate nature’s ability to reclaim post-industrial sites by depicting the colonisation of the old spoil heaps by pioneering wildflower species.

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

Another particularly accomplished effort was Vestra Wealth’s Encore – A Music Lover’s Garden, by Paul Martin. A sinuous path of consolidated hoggin between Corten steel edging winds through a landscape of sandstone rocks and lush planting, accompanied by a narrow rill, before descending into a small amphitheatre for musical performances surrounded by a curved pool.

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Some beautiful rusted steel sculptures nestle among the plants, their shape and form reminding me of pollen grains under the microscope.

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

The small space from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles might not win great plaudits for originality of design, but I loved it.Neat boundary hedges, cottage garden borders, with the centre of the lawn given over to a wildflower meadow and bounded by a mown grass path, and a red brick path leading between twin seating areas to catch the morning and the evening sun, it represents a vision of what is achievable in a typical small domestic garden. A wonderful, wildlife-friendly space.

Detail from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles

I would have liked to have seen more in the way of community gardens. Not to say there weren’t community spaces – there were some beautifully designed ones incorporating many a thoughtful idea but, as with Chris Beardshaw’s garden at Chelsea this year, they were posh, expensive ones, clearly designed by professional garden designers. While I’m aware that one of the reasons to come to an RHS show is to see how the professionals can push boundaries and use the latest, cutting edge techniques, materials and thinking, I can’t help but think that including more grassroots gardens, created from the ground-up by enthusiastic end users, would help to circumvent the uncomfortable feeling that these gardens are being bestowed upon grateful paupers by professionals, however well informed and intentioned (last year’s A Space to Connect and Grow from Jeni Cairns and Sophie Antonelli was a great example of how to get this right). While I think this could be a valid criticism of spaces like the Community Street and the Vestra Wealth garden, it’s less applicable to the Macmillan Legacy Garden which, while being conceived partly as a communal space and undeniably high end, is not designed as a living space, but more of a therapeutic space rather like the gardens of the Maggie’s Centres.

In past years, there’s been a definite feeling that people without pots of money to throw at the garden were being catered for. I wonder if that might have been lost a bit this year. It would also be good to see more on elegantly practical solutions to the kind of real-world problems that the garden and home can throw up, as with Mike Harvey’s A Room with a View from 2013’s Show, which built a wonderfully terraced garden on the spoil heap of soil excavated for the foundations of a typical home extension.

These small criticisms aside, it was good to see that the Conceptual gardens section is as bonkers as ever. It might not be everyone's cup of tea – not everything here is always my cup of tea, to be honest – but it’s good to see some interesting ideas being explored. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of synaesthesia, ever since hearing in a university lecture how the composer Oliver Messiaen, who experienced the condition, once demanded that the violins should play a particular section of his score “a little more pink”. So it was fantastic to experience the DialAFlight: Synaesthesia Garden by Sarah Wilson, which presents a heady mix of sensory stimulation with a creative combination of coloured lights, projected trigger words, sculpture and planting, inside a white canvass dome representing the mind of the synaesthete. Sadly I was enjoying myself so much I neglected to take any decent photos (please do let me know if you have any and I’ll feature one or two here, with appropriate credits, of course!).

Another garden I found particularly powerful in this section was Steve Smith’s SMART Vision garden, which portrays the attitudes of society to those suffering from mental health issues by enclosing the entire space in an austere, grey wall, wrapped in yellow and black hazard tape. Through peepholes in the wall you glimpse a tranquil space inside, a white, zen like circle of raked gravel surrounded by lush tree ferns and foliage plants, prehistoric flora that shows the resilience of nature left to its own devices. The inner walls are mirrored, so the space inside appears vast, and a strange feeling of fellowship succeeded the initial shock of discovering that you weren't the only person peering in on spying many other inquiring eyes among the plants.

Detail from Steve Smith’s SMART Vision Garden

Please click here to read the next part of my blog on RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015.

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015, part 2

June 30, 2015 Andrew OBrien

Why would you go to a flower show – for the the gardens, or for the plants? It’s true that some people go for the experience – event and retail marketing seems to be all about ‘experiences’ and ‘destinations’ now – but while these are animals I can identify in a crowd, quaffing their fizz* and seemingly more interested in being seen than in seeing, I have little to no real understanding of them. So...gardens, or plants? The show gardens can be inspiring, stimulating, frustrating and disappointing – I’m sure on occasion I’ve felt all of these emotions while pondering a single garden. But as for the plants on displayed in the floral marquee? I’d have no option but to laugh in the face of anyone who would dare to suggest that they are ever anything less than wondrous.

Wonderful textures and plants on the Todd’s Botanics stand

While working in the Floral Marquee on Sunday, I’d spent a lot of time trying not to tread on the trailing parts of Geranium 'Dusky Crug', one of my all-time favourite cransebills, which was on the beautifully planted stand of Todd’s Botanics. All purple, chocolate foliage and soft pink flowers, it’s like a deliciously sepia version of a vibrant garden favourite.

Geranium 'Dusky Crug', Todd’s Botanics

Imagine my delight on finding the very similar Geranium 'Dusky Rose' at Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants – so similar in fact that I’m having trouble telling the difference, and will have to wait till someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me!

Geranium 'Dusky Rose', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

Cosmos sulphureum 'Diablo', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

The Hardy’s display also featured the fabulously flame orange of Cosmos sulphureus 'Diablo' – I’ll definitely be growing this next year –

Verbascum 'Firedance', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

and, while we’re on the subject of the infernal, the metre high flower spikes of Verbascum 'Firedance'.

A few plants appeared to be following me around. This is a common experience at flower shows – you engage with a particular variety, and then can’t help noticing it as you move around the marquee, and even out into the showground.

The first of these was an interesting Rose 'Hot Chocolate', first sighted by me on the stand of Madrona Nursery, and then seen again in the marquee for the Festival of Roses. It’s a floribunda rose with a long flowering season, about 90cm high, with very good disease resistance, striking blooms of a deep coppery red shade on deep green leaves. Yet another for my wish list.

Rosa 'Hot Chocolate', Madrona Nurseries

Rosa 'Hot Chocolate'

Another apparently ubiquitous rose was 'Blue for You'. Not being a huge fan of roses in the lilac areas of the colour spectrum, it’s a source of interest to me that I've managed to end up planting both 'Twice in a Blue Moon' and 'Harry Edland' in our own garden. Perhaps I should go for this one and make it a clear hat-trick.

My next planty stalker was Hydrangea arborescens 'Invincibelle', which looks to me very much like a pink tinged Annabelle. I wonder if it does the green and cream colour change thing like the better known variety?

Hydrangea arborescens 'Invincibelle', The Big Plant Nursery

There was another pink tinged hydrangea on the stand of the Big Plant Nursery, with the vomit-inducing cultivar name 'Love You Kiss'. If you can keep hold of your dinner, however, it’s an attractive lacecap, with a reddish tinge around the rim of the petals.

Hydrangea 'Love You Kiss', The Big Plant Nursery

It’s always good to see local nurseries, and another Kent representative is Plantbase. Graeme had brought his party piece, the terrifying Solamnum pyracanthum, with its violet flowers, glaucous foliage and bright orange spikes. The Sid Vicious of potatoes.

Solanum pyracanthum, Plantbase

There was also my favourite tea tree plant, Leptospermum scoparium 'Red Damask'.

Leptospermum scoparium 'Damask Red', Plantbase

By now, it was probably time to cool off after all these hot colours. Nowhere better for this than the display of heucheras, heucherellas and tiarellas from Plantagogo. I was charmed by the dark purples and silver tones of Heucherella 'Cracked Ice', with its creamy white flowers.

Heucherella 'Cracked Ice', Plantagogo

A similar cooling effect can be had with Heuchera 'Silver Celebration'.

Heuchera 'Silver Celebration', Plantagogo

I was also interested to see the new introduction, Tiarella 'Emerald Ellie' – not a million miles away from 'Sugar and Spice'.

Tiarella 'Emerald Ellie', Plantagogo

While on Sunday I was busy assisting Heather and Fran of Fibrex Nurseries with their pelargonium display, Richard was putting the finishing touches to the adjacent stand featuring their ferns and specimens from the national collection of Hedera (ivies) which they hold. A lush and shady work of art, I’ll be carrying a photograph of this around with me to flourish on the very next occasion (there will be several) when someone looks bored or rolls their eyes upon my suggesting ivies for their dark, north facing wall or fence.

Ivies and ferns, Fibrex Nurseries

I’m keen to go an explore both of these collections on the nursery – if I can just avoid being waylaid by pelargoniums – but the selection on show here demonstrated the range and variety available, and what can be achieved in a small space.

Ferns Asplenium scolopendrium and Adiantum venustrum surround a terracotta pot filled with Hedera helix 'Goldfinch', Fibrex nurseries

Hedera helix 'Ivalace', Fibrex Nurseries

The splendidly named Hedera 'Pink and Curly', Fibrex Nurseries

Hedera helix 'Spetchley', Fibrex Nurseries

And what of the pelargoniums? Here I have to exercise some restraint, else I’d be posting photos of everything in the display!

The first spot goes to regal Pelargonium 'Beryl Reid', with its outrageously frou-frou ruffles – salmon pink with maroon centres. Gloriously flouncy.

Regal Pelargonium 'Beryl Reid', Fibrex Nurseries

Still with the regals, I met two similar varieties, 'Fringed Aztec' and 'Arnside Fringed Aztec', both with large white blooms with respectively red and deep pink markings in the centres.

Regal Pelargonium 'Fringed Aztec', Fibrex Nurseries

Regal Pelargonium 'Arnside Fringed Aztec', Fibrex Nurseries

Possibly as showy, but more delicate, is 'Fairy Orchid', with carmine blotches to the top of the two upper petals, and the characteristic ‘false eyelash’ markings to the centre of the flower.

Angel Pelargonium 'Fairy Orchid', Fibrex Nurseries

Used on the display for its fabulous cut foliage, Pelargonium 'Charity' has vivid green variagated leaves, with an orange citrus scent. The mauve flowers are probably the least spectacular thing about this plant.

Scented Pelargonium 'Charity', Fibrex Nurseries

Scented Pelargonium 'Ardwick Cinnamon', Fibrex Nurseries

My final offering from the Floral Marquee is an unassuming plant, that takes hold of you by stealth. I’m rather fond of its compact habit and small, glaucous leaves, a perfect backdrop to its small white flowers. But its the unexpectedly spicy scent of cinnamon from the crushed foliage that really sets this particular pellie apart. One that needs to be smelled to be believed.

All this has left me with the not unpleasant task of prioritising my plant wish list. I have a feeling that they're not all going to fit back in the greenhouse come winter, but that’s a worry for another day.

Please click here to read the first part of my blog on RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015.

* This isn’t to suggest that gardeners eschew the quaffing of fizz. In fact, we’re far from an abstemious lot, and are as good at this as we are at tracking down and consuming cake. It’s just that we do this as an adjunct to viewing gardens and drooling over plants, not an alternative.

Salvia ‘Kate Glen'

June 27, 2015 Andrew OBrien

Salvia plugs on the potting bench. (The beer is for the slugs!)

Those awfully nice people at Unwins have sent me some plants to review.

Having been warned of their imminent arrival, today the postman brought me a small cardboard box continain three healthy looking plugs of Salvia 'Kate Glen'. Unwins are the sole distributor of this variety in the UK, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the plants perform.

I’m assuming that this is the same cultivar of Salvia nemorosa described on the website of Lambley Nursery in Australia, owned by David Glenn, who named the variety after his daughter. If this is the case, a letter 'n' appears to have gone astray somewhere in the journey from the antipodes, but the description of the plants seems to be more or less the same.

I’m particularly excited about these plants as I’ve recently had a run in with some voracious rabbits in one of my client’s gardens – rabbits who stubbornly refuse to read the literature which advises whether or not they should find a particular plant palatable. They’ve had a good go at just about everything, with the exception, I’ve noticed, of the achillea. While I now view lists of rabbit-resistant plants – on many of which salvia appears – with a degree of cynicism, I find that I’m encouraged by the rabbits’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for a plant with strongly scented leaves. Perhaps the salvias, like the achillea, will survive the onslaught of the critters.

Rabbit resistance is all very well, but unless you plant something with some aesthetic merit, you might as well cultivate a field of thistles. Salvia 'Kate Glen purports to reach a good 90cm in height, with bright green leaves on deep purple stems, and two-tone flower spikes – half the total height of the plant – pink in bud at the top, and opening violet lower down. The flowering period is reputedly long – well into autumn, apparently, and the plants are drought tolerant and frost hardy. Having initially potted the plugs on into 9cm pots, I’ll be trialling them in my garden at home before I consider exposing them to a site plagued by fearsome Leporidae. Here, we’ve only the slugs and snails to worry about. And a famously ravenous border terrier.

I’ll post again later on in the summer to let you know how they’re getting on.

Hole Park Gardens

June 13, 2015 Andrew OBrien

To Hole Park near Rolvenden this afternoon, ostensibly to have a good nosey around the gardens under the expert guidance of senior gardener Louise Nicholls, although today I was just as interested in the cake and company. I’ve had cause to observe in the past what a fantastic cadre of gardening folk congregate on Twitter (and lately, Facebook too – though perhaps I’m a little late to the party on that particular platform), and today I got to meet several of them in person. Happily, I can report that, once again, I found them just as friendly, supportive, and knowledgeable in real life as they are online. And to think, someone once said that social media was no good for gardeners.

A gathering of gardeners among the generously airy planting in the Millennium Garden

There are three species of newt found in Britain. Apparently, they all live in here

But first things first - the cake had to be earned, and the prospect of refreshment was held out before us by Lou as an incentive to keep us moving through the garden – a necessary cruelty, since as a group we displayed on more than one occasion an inclination to linger in a particular space, the better to appreciate it in all its fulness. However, the desire to tarry in any one spot being incompatible with the imperative to gain an overview of a large garden within a set period of time, we were kept moving.

Rocky pauses to fondle a geranium

The gardens at Hole Park cover 15 acres, laid out and planted in the inter-war years by the great grandfather of the current owner, and featuring many distinct garden spaces (“garden room” doesn’t seem an appropriate phrase when including lawns, meadows and woodland). These include a tropical border, a sunken Italianate garden sitting between two long herbaceous borders, a lawn with exquisitely pruned standard wisterias, the rockery, camellia walk, wildflower meadows (known as the Policy) and bluebell wood with a brick ice house, and a formal lawn complete with yew topiary, a pool with fountains and a stunning backdrop of the wealden landscape. I made a rough running tally of at least 15 separate spaces – though I’ve probably missed one or two – all bound together by miles of tightly clipped yew hedging and views out into the Kentish countryside. And to keep all of this in check – just two and a half full time staff, including head gardener Quentin Stark. This is bordering on feat of superhuman degree – although I did notice that Lou drinks an awful lot of coffee.

Lou, coffee mug in hand, demonstrating that at least the sundial doesn’t wobble

The estate occupies a position on the map almost exactly half way between Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, although I’m not entirely convinced how useful it is to make a comparison with either of these. In feel and ambiance, it seems to me to be more akin to the gardens of its other near neighbour, Scotney Castle, only without the single, breathtakingly romantic picture-postcard view (the picture postcard view here, from the front of the house with a windmill on the left and a monument on the right, harks back to an earlier age of landscape design). It possesses a similar rolling topography, the sudden, Rousham-like plunge of the land towards the water course in the valley – perhaps a much wilder interpretation of a picturesque landscape than the national trust property – after all, Hole Park is a much later garden. We were of course too late for the magnolias and the bluebells in the woods, but we caught the tail-end of the display of the azaleas and rhododendrons, again providing echoes of Scotney. There’s also a similar interplay between parkland and garden – the more intimate, enclosed spaces opening out onto wide lawns, with the Policy, the dell and the woodland beyond.

The gardeners do a fabulous job of tending the formal hedges, lawns and border in the vicinity of the house. But it’s in the less manicured areas where the magic really starts to happen, along the grassy paths mown through swathes of wildflowers, in the glades and rides in the woodland area, beneath a giant gunnera beckoning from the further side of a pond apparently filled with vichyssoise, and fringed with candelabra primulas. These are the places I want to come back to and explore.

The gunnera and Persicaria 'Red Dragon' framing the pond of leek and potato soup

The long-awaited cake, by the way, was excellent.

With thanks to Louise Nicholls for leading the day, Quentin Stark and Edward Barham and the AllHorts Facebook group for their support.

Lou is planning to trek to Machu Pichu next year on behalf of Marie Curie. Do visit her justgiving page if you’d like to make a donation in support.

Running for Perennial

June 4, 2015 Andrew OBrien

On 12 July 2015 I shall be running the British 10K through the streets of London in aid of Perennial, the Gardeners Royal Benevolent Society. I run regularly – albeit rather slowly – enjoying the time and space it gives me to think things through, and often wondering if there can be any conceivable link between the enjoyment I get from plodding along pavements and country lanes, and that which I feel when engaged in horticultural pursuits. This post has been languishing half written in my draft folder for over a year now. Time to polish it it up and share it with you.

Running and gardening. Two activities you might not consider to occupy much common ground. I enjoy both, though I'm not about to advocate that every gardener should take up running. And I certainly can’t claim ever to have attempted indulging in the one while simultaneously being immersed in the other – in fact, rather than dashing about at breakneck speed on the other end of a hoe, it could be argued that I can be a bit too cerebral in my own garden; it’s good to stop and think, and dream about how the garden could be, but the vision won’t even begin to be realised until you get down to it. And as for gardening while out running, I couldn’t so much as hazard a guess how that might be done.

But, for me at any rate, there are similarities between running and gardening; if not in the outworking of each, then in the processes I observe within myself, as well as in some of the external factors which govern the results of my efforts.

There are three things about running – three limiting factors, if you like. Breath. Legs. Mind. When I get these three in balance and under control, I almost feel as though I’m flying, speeding through the landscape powered by nothing other than sunlight and my own body’s energy, each foot strike simulataneously grounding me to the earth and pushing me off from it. But the three things are not often in balance, and they’re rarely under my control; either I’m not quite sucking in enough oxygen with each breath to power me efficiently through to the next, or my leg muscles are tight; the outside of one knee is grumbling (tight illiotibial band), the inside of the other is sore (tight inner quads), or my feet are thudding into the ground like jack hammers, but with none of that marvellously elastic recoil that powers me along on the good days (tight shins). And, on the rare occasions where I’m breathing well and my legs are springy and strong, my mind will start casting about for problems, running through increasingly neurotic self-diagnostic routines, and trying to convince me that a nice rest by the next field gate would be just the thing, and hardly knock anything off my time at all, if it didn’t help me to run the next leg even faster. The physical factors – hills, weather, ground conditions – can seem as nothing to the combined double whammy of body and brain when I’m out on a run.

As with running, so with gardening. It looks like an entirely physical occupation, but part of the attraction is the constant mental engagement with your garden. You’re continually on the lookout for signs, those points of information that alert you to the presence of a pest, disease, or some form of environmental stress. And, should you be in the fortunate position to have relieved your plants from the limiting factors which threaten to stunt their healthy grown – light, warmth, water, nutrition, the absence of nasty things – then you’ll no doubt be battling physical restrictions – insufficient space, quirks of design and landscaping, lack of time... a seemingly endless list, each item extending an accusatory finger in the direction of the gardener. I ask myself, (trying very hard not to sound too much like Carrie Bradshaw); with my own personal resources, how much of a limiting factor to the development of my garden am I?

That’s a big question, and probably one of the main reasons I’m often to be found standing up to my knees in goosegrass in the middle of a flower bed, apparently lost in reverie. I know my own abilities and vision place a limit on the potential of my garden, but I can take steps to minimise this effect. I can put in the time training, expanding my horticultural skills through reading, pracitising, and talking to more experienced gardeners, and – as with running – I can look after my own personal fitness level. I want to be supple enough to garden well into my old age, so I intend to keep active. I eat a good diet, I run, I stretch – I try not to take my body for granted. I even dabble with yoga from time to time – but if I’m a journeyman gardener, and a pretty bad runner, I’m utterly terrible at yoga. I’ll keep at it, though, in my own (unbendy) way.

I’ve had a few gardening related niggles – pulled muscles, sore knees, tennis elbow, nothing too serious, but enough to remind me how important our bodies are to us gardeners. But while we can do our utmost to guard against the injury and illness that would curtail or even put an end to our favourite activity, sometimes things can happen that are beyond our control – devastating to the keen gardener, and financially crippling to the professional. In such cases – as well as in instances where those dependent on a living in horticulture find themsselves in straightened circumstances for whatever reason – the charity Perennial is there to help, and I’m proud to be able to run for them in July. There are, of course, a wealth of good and deserving causes, but if you’re reading this it’s likely that you have some interest in gardens, and I would urge you to have a look at the Perennial website at perennial.org.uk to see the important work that they do. And if you’d like to sponsor me for the British 10k, please visit my justgiving page here.