Home & Garden

52 The West Dorset Magazine, July 15, 2022 Homes & Gardens x Horticulture...

...with Diana Holman

The floral show that almost never was

By Diana Holman

When Bere Regis club chairman Bob Holman won 2nd prize in the Area Show in 2019 he was offered the opportunity to get a team together to represent the area at the Malvern Spring Festival – a huge exhibit 3.6m wide, 1.5m deep and 2.3m high. Sheila Bendall and her good friend Sylvia Cook joined us to stage the exhibit. Bob cleared a space in our garage and masking tape marked out the dimensions. Every week we got together, fortifying ourselves with coffee and cake before braving the icy chill of the garage in midwinter to work on the ideas we had amassed. Sheila came up with the quotation: Leave only footprints Take only memories We made one side of the exhibit into an area of jungle with a pool. Footprints in the sand led across to the heat and vibrant colours of India. We began to build up the mock-up gradually using potted dragon trees, palms, ferns and air plants, with arrangements in the pinks and apricots so often seen in saris. I painted the quotation on a wood slice, and constructed a pool, using a heavy glass coffee table top brought back from the tip. A thin plywood base went underneath painted dark green, slightly streaked with silver. Lines of water weed were fashioned from delicate trails of sisal in lime green and dark green. I made a snake for our jungle, covering a realistic rubber toy with scales made from Puy lentils. (Hour upon hour of doing this half cured me of my ophidiophobia). I also covered a large pot with overlapping leaves of the wild petasites (Butterbur) for the floor-standing arrangement in India, and constructed a sun from betula pendula (silver birch) twigs, wired and coiled. All the while, anxiety was growing about covid, and Malvern’s Spring Festival was cancelled. With sadness, we dismantled our mock-up. The festival was cancelled for the second time in 2021, everything up to Worcestershire? Not many firms were willing to hire a van to over 75-year-olds. Somehow it all went in our cars, but I had to carry my

petite and miniature entries in a box on my lap when I was not driving. Sylvia was in really bad pain with sciatica, but bravely carried on. When it came to her task of making the footprints in the sand leading from the jungle to India, she almost fell into the flowers. By early evening, the exhibit was almost complete. Everyone was totally exhausted. Sheila had done all the flower arrangements, whilst the team together had worked on the plants, rocks and driftwood which made up a large part of the exhibit. The following day the show opened and we had won a Silver-gilt! It is always thrilling to get an award, particularly at a prestigious show like Malvern or Chelsea. Judges said it was a really impressive exhibit and had only just missed that coveted Gold. It was a great experience and we were very proud to have represented Dorset and Guernsey Area in 2022. Diana Holman, Bere Regis Floral Group Plant of the week: Carrots (Daucus carota)

Carrots may be a firm favourite in the vegetable garden, but to find them growing wild in west Dorset, visit the coast or downlands with thin chalky or limestone soils. Carrots go largely unnoticed among the other grassland plants during their first year, but during their second, their flowers are spectacular comprising dome-shaped umbels made up of hundreds of small white flowers. There are many similar looking blooms but a characteristic of carrot is a set of darker flowers at the centre of the umbel. In case you were wondering, the roots of wild carrots are white, the orange pigment of those from the vegetable patch was bred into them in the 1700s.