Strong Beauty
Strong Beauty
How the road to the 2025 RHS Chelsea Flower Show began
The luck of the draw
Where would we be without some fortune? A piece of luck which meant we had books in our house? The gift of parents who took an interest in our schooling? An education which through example, through reading, through discussion, shows us the benefits of one path and the disadvantages of another? Any or all of these, plus the pure and utter luck not to have met that one person, been in that one situation, taken that really bad decision, agreeing perhaps to do that one thing, which would land us in trouble.
Where might we be indeed.
This week, I’ll be explaining how meeting some extraordinary women has inspired the creation of a very special garden.
Before we do that, a reminder that the Small Garden Design course has started. You can start this course at any time: the introduction is here, and a summary of the course is here. Any questions you have, please do pop them on the Chat, where you’ll find lots of us popping in and out over the week. It’s also where we have the weekly Sunday Show Us Your Plots where we just swap snaps of what our gardens are looking like (bad as well as good - there’s no judgement).
Anything is possible as far as your garden space is concerned. There’s even hope for the oddest-shaped garden with no privacy and a tiny budget:
We’ve looked at quite a few annoyingly-shaped gardens in the past - here are a couple of them that you might find helpful:
Part 2 of the Small Garden Design Course will be appearing on Wednesday.
You can find the Container of the Month in last week’s feature, whilst bare-root rose planting advice is here. Whilst we’re on the subject, I have to say that the best performer at the moment has to be Rosa ‘Kew Gardens’. Big hydrangea-like clusters of small, single flowers just keep on coming, despite the hammering downpours. Soft apricot buds open to pure white, with a hint of soft lemon, all on virtually thornless stems. There is no catch to this rose as far as I can tell. One for your shopping basket.
I’m going to be planting up the bulb meadow, as it basically didn’t happen this week. Do you ever have weeks like that? The weather was perfect, the conditions were just right - but I just didn’t have time, and each day the ‘planting to-do’ was crossed out in the diary and moved to the following day. As yet, there has been no action on that front.
In theory, the tulips are going to be planted in the pots in November (although this tulip-planting job can actually wait for weeks, even till Christmas, and even just beyond that if you still haven’t got round to it. I don’t hugely recommend a January planting, but I have been known to resort to it, and the tulips do still come. Shorter, admittedly, but they do flower).
In a perfect world, I’d love to get the meadow planting finished this week, along with all the irises and mini-narcissi which will be going in their own little pots so that they can be moved around easily to enjoy in the spring. We’ll see how that plan to plant goes, though - ask me next week how I got on.
Meantime, a forgotten nerine, planted a few years ago, has finally flowered in a pot I was about to empty.
The slugs and various other visitors were all over these properly pink trumpets, but they couldn’t take away from the sheer beauty of this plant, which came with its own background of twinkling light shining through the leaves of the copper beech in the background. Fellow Gardening Mind Emma tells us that photographers call this blurry background effect ‘bokeh’1 - who knew?
Adding to the sparkles are the fireworks and explosions of the last of the last of the dahlias, still pushing out flowers and looking very happy against the changing leaves of autumn. Dew droplets creep up stems and onto petals, whilst overnight, spiders gift every plant some lacy underwear.
This combination of D. “Verrone’s Obsidian, ‘Burlesca’, ‘Nuit d’Eté’ and ‘Otto’s Thrill’ has been a particularly good one this year: the burgundies and peaches are looking as good together in vases now as they were a couple of months ago.
For the whole list of the October garden to-dos and not-to-dos, complete with my initial bare-root rose order and yet more bulb information, visit here:
“Never again”
Why not come up with a design for a show garden at a flower show, for something you’ve never tried out before and therefore you don’t know if it is even completely possible, using plants that may not even flower? Then commit to building it in 19 days, and at the end of all of this, showing it to the public at a show which has 175,000 visitors over a week, and GAZILLIONS of viewers online and on TV? Oh, and not forgetting that you’re putting yourself and your design skills at the mercy of judges who will decide, in their wisdom, whether your garden merits a medal of any colour?
Does any of the above sound like a good idea to you?
Possibly one of the worst parts of making a show garden is the realisation that once you’ve finished building and planting it, and you are on your knees with exhaustion/hypothermia/heatstroke/anxiety/hysteria, you’ve only now gone and handed over for public scrutiny that precise thing which has a.consumed your thoughts for a whole year and b.consumed your energies totally for the month of May. Surviving on adrenaline with only a few hours’ sleep each night, your mission has been to bring to life that one great idea that you truly hope is still original, exciting and capable of transporting the garden visitor - whether they’re seeing it in real life, or via the television or though a photo - into your mind, into your vision.
In 2019, after my last garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, I’d decided that for all of the reasons above, I just didn’t need to create another show garden. I’d made a dozen or so show gardens over the years. Leave it to the youngsters, I thought.
The Glasshouse
Strong women supporting other women who hadn’t had the fortune that others have had
This might look like your average, pretty, independent lifestyle store, full of pots and houseplants and all sorts of lovely housey stuff. But The Glasshouse is so much more.
Founded in 2020 by Kali Hamerton Stove and social entrepreneur Melissa Murdoch, The Glasshouse has grown into a leading example of a successful social enterprise, determined to reduce reoffending by ensuring women released from prison have improved opportunities and are prepared for release. The Glasshouse offers intensive training and resettlement support ensuring women have the best chance at a second opportunity for a fulfilled and positive life.
The Glasshouse provides horticulture training and employment to women in prison and recently released from prison. It creates opportunities for more women in prison, and sets out to challenge beliefs and preconceptions about people in prison, providing confidence-building, unique training and work experience for women on the team.
It trains women in prison to a very high level to provide consumer retail experience including selling plants through their shop, and fulfilling and shipping orders through their webshop. Corporate plant services include design, installation and maintenance services; there are also well-being potting workshops, and Christmas tree rental and decoration.
In Kali’s own words:
“The initial opportunity to join The Glasshouse is offered to women at the end of their prison sentence and we work with three women’s prisons across Kent and Surrey, including HMP East Sutton Park open prison near Maidstone. At any given time we have up to eight women from HMP East Sutton Park who are part of the programme and work with us part time, which is something we’re immensely proud of.
When they’re not working in the shop, wrapping online orders or planning the next installation for our plantscaping work in London, The Glasshouse women are busy at the company’s ‘Growing HQ’, which is also in Cranbrook. We host regular training sessions here where the plants are nurtured and prepared, and the site also hosts the houseplant workshops which are run by our talented, green-fingered women.”
And here’s something to think about:
“Nearly all of these women have been the subject of abuse and violence in their lives and many of their crimes are linked to this experience. Most have never had a plant or grown anything. By taking time to train them, to learn their strengths and abilities and show them a rewarding job, a supportive team and the potential for success and happiness, we believe something as small as a houseplant can change their lives. The opportunity to step away from the noisy, overwhelming, political world of prison into a quiet glasshouse has a profound and positive effect on women’s mental health. Fulfilling a role, reaching targets and being part of a supportive team truly builds self-confidence and self-belief.”
When I first met Kali and her team a few years ago, I immediately absolutely loved what they stood for. Strong women supporting other women who hadn’t had the fortune that others have had, and who, for a variety of reasons which often include the lack of opportunity, had ended up in the prison system. How easy it is to judge, but as soon as we take a step back and look at what we have compared to others, hopefully we start to see things differently.
A year or so after we first met, Kali called me. “I know this is really, really, unlikely, but do you think we’d stand a chance of winning funding from Project Giving Back2 for a Chelsea show garden?”
There was only one way to find out.
Along with my team, we went to the planting warehouse in Cranbrook to meet the women. who were on the programme at the time. They shared with us their experience of prison, and their dreams of a space of their own.
These are all quotes we noted at that meeting, as we talked about what they might want from an imaginary garden, what they might hope for, how they might feel if they had that space, and how they felt when they were working with plants:
“A space to regain dignity, privacy and self- worth”
“I am able to get used to telling my story”
“I have a new appreciation for scent”
“I feel like my senses are heightened”
“Finding a rare moment of silence”
“We’re so grateful to feel visible”
“We not only nurture the plants, we are nurturing ourselves as individuals and as a group”
It was possibly one of the most thought-provoking days of my life. Whatever happened, I was going to pour my heart and soul into designing a garden for these women, a garden which would be for them as well as represent them. I would work with them, we would collaborate to conjure up a garden. They would get a second chance.
And so it was that we set off on our Chelsea journey.
And before you go, please could you ❤️ this post? The ❤️ gives this post a shot of something very powerful and send it whizzing over to people who would otherwise miss it. So thank you x
In photography, bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in out-of-focus parts of an image, whether foreground or background or both.
Project Giving Back is the vision of two private individuals who want to support a wide range of charitable causes whose work suffered during the global Covid-19 pandemic and continues to be affected by the economic downturn and cost-of-living crisis. The grant-making scheme gives UK-based charities and other charitable organisations the chance to apply for a fully-funded garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, subject to the usual RHS selection process. This is a unique opportunity for charities to raise awareness of and support for their work at the world’s most famous horticultural event.
I agree with every one of the comments below. I can see it will be a real collaboration as you seem to be truly listening to all the women involved. A huge endeavour. ‘I’m so excited to see it unfold. Hope you take a good video of the finished product. The BBC Chelsea coverage always leaves me wanting more details.
The Glasshouse Project looks really cool and inspiring.
Great dahlias. They are the most astonishing flowers. Are they my favourite? Are tulips? I think tulips take the prize. And, an aside, isn’t the naming of flowers (Burlesca!) is quite a scene? I (admittedly idiosyncratically) renamed a dahlia I bought as Leather Queen for its coriaceous black leaves and cerise single flower because it just (ok…to me) seemed fitting.