Newsletter for march

Thank you to everyone that came to the meeting on Tuesday evening and helping to make the club night such a good one, it was nice to see so many faces. A warm welcome to our two newest organising team members, Elaine and Elizabeth, who are doing wonders to make sure the club is as good as it possibly can be.

Thank you for all the volunteers for the tea rota, we have just one slot left so if anyone is willing to be in charge of the giant tea pot just let us know!

Celia very kindly donated some Dahlia tubers which were gratefully taken by members for their gardens.

A quick couple of reminders for everyone. We need volunteers for the plant sale please, just manning the stand for an hour or helping to set up will be a big help and if anyone is available the day before to help price up the plants that would be wonderful. Please grow as much as you can, we had such a wonderful amount of great quality plants last year, lets do that again!

I am putting together prices and details for the club trip and will have a sign up sheet for next meeting.

Another reminder to all that Kaunda Plants are opening their Hellebore garden for charity on 6^th and 20^th March between 2-4pm. Should be a wonderful display for those that can make it.

I’m sure plenty of you remember Tom who used to be part of the team. He has approached us whilst wearing his Bedminster Town Team hat to see if as a club we are interested in doing so gardening every now and then in the new pocket park that is being created in the Ebenezer Gate Space. This is the space that Matthew mentioned in the AGM that is being redeveloped and they would like a group to come in and tidy it up every so often in return for a donation to the club. I will bring more details to the next meeting, but this is some food for thought and any comments or feed back would be very welcome.

Our speaker this Month was Clare Greenslade who is the head gardener at Hestercombe Gardens, and what a wonderful speaker she turned out to be. With a very limited team of 6 gardeners to look after and restore the 100 acre site she really does have her work cut out, but with such wonderful records of the original planting by Gertrude Jekyll and a fabulous collection of Bampfylde paintings to go by, there is a real dedication to maintaining the original gardens themes and feel. It has been an incredible space through out its life from the creation in the 1500’s, through the landscaping in the 1750’s right through to the war when its direction took a sudden turn for the worse with the American troops moving in! Things nearly went very wrong for the garden when it was the Somerset Fire Station from the 1970’s when the gardens were saved from being tarmac’d by just one vote!

After this in the 1990’s, Philip White, then working for Somerset Wildlife Trust who were based in the house, discovered the garden whilst roaming in his lunch hours. He saw the garden that was hidden under all the over grown trees and did everything possible (including remortgaging his house without his wife knowing) to get the gardens back to their former glory. His passion to keep the gardens true to the original design means the gardens are now one of the greatest examples of its type in the country. It’s hard as a modern gardener to understand the thinking behind the design of the garden, but it would have been a hugely emotive garden for its visitors and still today the views and vistas are breath taking with every planting being put together like a landscape painting. The design of the garden was purposefully done to avoid the eye drifting to the rather uninteresting house and makes the very most of the view out to the surrounding hills.

Moving in to the future plans are coming together to develop an ever changing modern garden in stark contrast to the fierce adherence to historical accuracy of the renovated gardens. It is hoped that a vegetable garden that was part of the estate can be reinstated if the local farmer agrees to free it from its potato growing purpose at present and plans are also being put in place to create a new cycle and pedestrian entrance to the garden.

It’s hard to sum up all that we learned from Clare, but it has driven us to put a trip to the gardens in the plan for August. I for one can’t wait to meet the grumpy swan!

Thanks again to all of you who came and made it a great evening.

The team.