Last night to the hot and sticky city for a horticultural conjunction of great magnificence – Alan Titchmarsh interviewing Beth Chatto (not so much shock and awe as charm and awwww!)
Entreated by James A-S to blog fulsomely about said occasion I shall endeavour to do so – although my excuse for covering the social rather than the thoughtful aspects is that I want to try to pull this event and several others together into a more considered article for publication elsewhere (well, the creative writing exercises need to restart now that the broken arm is healed enough to type properly again!)
…also, I’ve been upstairs twice to pick up the notes I made on the evening, forgotten them and come back down again – I’m not getting out of the armchair a third time.
So, 6pm and a great gathering of elegantly floral ladies outside the Garden Museum, perched on tombs (it’s a church!) and rattling the door in eager anticipation. Self looked rather disreputable and grubby having leapt on train straight from work (still in composty uniform.) A different gardening cross-section than the normal Vista events at the GM - fewer professional designers, more hands-on-at-home practitioners perhaps?
Sitting gossiping with other members of the audience we idly wondered where the protagonists were waiting when, suddenly, a familiar figure darted discreetly across the back of the stage. I was tempted to test out my new Twittering capacity with an ‘Alan Titchmarsh is in the loo’ tweet (look me up under New Shoot if you want to share tweets) but thought it might damage the dignity of the occasion..
After suitable relief the participants entered stage left. The Chairman of the Garden Museum (who he?) introduced the occasion by making an excruciatingly embarrassing and almost entirely incomprehesible joke about his wife, Geoff Hamilton and Gardeners World.
There followed what can only be described as a cosy hour. Alan (of the loovely speaking voice) obviously very fond of Beth, gently nudging stories out of her. Beth obliging by holding forth on a range of topics from glacial deposition to homemade jam. At one point the conversation bizarrely veered onto compulsory sterilisation to save the planet from humankind but Alan, with a subtle verve borne of long practice on afternoon TV, guided the topic back to horticulture with barely a ruffle of his blowdried hair.
If you’ve read Beth’s books then there was nothing new in the topics covered (except, under serious pressing from Alan, a very mildly scurrilous tale of a tiff with Christo) but what came across anew was how hard this elegant, delicate great-grandmother had worked to get her nursery and garden established and the great joy she finds in the plants she grows.
A bowl of gorgeous specimens of trillium, fritillary and skunk cabbage flowers was displayed and discussed, leading to a highly comic interlude with Alan waving the largest and lewdest lysichiton americanus x catchatcensis merrily in the air - an event I have almost entirely failed to capture for you on my camera phone at high zoom from halfway back in the audience (close one eye and squint sideways, you might just get it)
At the end, questions and tributes to a woman whose writings about planting for place mean so much to all real gardeners, a few tears (on the stage and in the audience) and a wondering as to what will happen to the gardens when she is no longer there to influence them (no satisfactory answer), a gentle summing up in a warm Northern accent, another entirely incomprehensible and decades out of date joke about GW from the Chairman, then exit into the last of the Easter sunshine enjoying the warm feeling of companionship shared by gardeners everywhere.
As is usual at GM events, a sound recording team was hard at work, so I would expect a podcast to be available (on the GI website?) soon.
This has been sitting on the carpet of a first floor bedroom. It wasn't until I saw the tell-tale silver trail on the paper that I worked out a slug had been eating my work - how it climbed the stairs I've no idea! Not sure I'd believe my students if they told me it had happened to their work...
