29th May - Preparing for the garden show at Ingliston
I’ve just had a very enjoyable and productive 2 week period out at Oatridge and then at Ingliston preparing for the Garden show….. a lot of tricky wood-work that for a long time resembled boxes with lavvy seats attached all around them…. Then it all came together for the exhibit, and a grand exhibit it was….. something to be proud of………once we rubbed out the pencil marks etc.
Looking around the rest of the show earlier today……(it starts tomorrow)…….there are vast numbers of exhibits there now in all different styles…….the Jacussi exhibits, the Dry Stone Walling Association’s fine collection of arches, Jupiter’s jig-saw…. But what I was struck by was the huge influence that TV garden “makeover” shows have had on the majority of exhibits….. Exhibits that tend to look as if they’ve been constructed from a flat pack bought at IKEA with plants “slotted” into their allotted spaces or as if they’ve “popped up” in a teletubby landscape…. Many looking as if a large part of the finished product came from high energy industrial rather than human labour intensive horticultural processes…..(the sort of things the Volunteers do all the time and are so good at).
I did ask Heath at one point, “where’s the dung?”…….and wondered about the feasibility of an exhibit which could be at the same time attractive and relate to the “muck” aspect of gardening…… I often pass by various of Edinburgh’s allotments and I guess that that’s the kind of gardening approach that I tend to identify with…. And there’s still plenty of demand for allotments…………
I do recognise that the TV makeover approach has made gardening, of a kind, much more available to many more people but I wonder whether it’s an approach that’s really capable of getting people involved in the real dirty handed and sweaty processes of horticulture.
Rob Hainsworth
