Saturday, February 19, 2011

Location of my show garden on the showground


It has been ages since I updated the blog. I do apologise to those who; actually follow what I write here :-) The usual excuses for the lack of updates, full time job rendering Keni useless during the evenings.

Anyway, tonight I will show you a plan view (on your left) of where my garden will be situated at the Three Counties Agricultural Society (TCAS) showground at Malvern, UK.
The plan is orientated towards the west, and I have circled where my garden will be. As such, my garden will be facing west. To be honest I am quite pleased with the positioning of my garden. If you can see on the plan, Avenue F is a high-traffic path and I am very happy with the organisation's confidence in placing my garden on such an important path for the visitors. I just hope I do not disgrace them!

One of my main sponsor's booth, Bradstone, is just next to me, with the garden of a fellow contestant (Paul) behind my garden. The rest of the plot on the left side of the plan are other contestants of the Chris Beardshaw scholarship. On the right hand side of the plan, you can see the location of the "professional gardens", ie thos created by professionals with a professional budget. I actually met of these professionals, Hannah Genders, a Chelsea-award winning garden designer during one of briefings orga
nised by the TCAS. Hannah was very friendly, and I can't wait to see how her garden turns out.

I am also pleased to let you all know that almost all my plants are now sorted, and they will be sponsored by three garden centres/nurseries located around the West Countries. The alpines will be generously provided by the 3Shires Garden Centre, the marginals and a 'feature' tree peony will be supplied by Kelways Plants Ltd (a very very respectable plant nursery who has won countless Chelsea medals), and the bamboos will be provided by Desert to Jungle. I have spoken/met up with my generous sponsors and they have all been very encouraging.

I am over the moon that Kelways will be providing me with one flowering tree peony. These are very fickle plants and they are notorious for being difficult to show, but Kelways are very famous for displaying award winning peonies, so I think everything should goes to plan on that day. I have sketched out a couple of ideas on how I would display them:

or:













This weekend, I am busy sorting out and figuring out the amount of timber that I would need to build all the hard-landscaping features. So this will feature in my next update. Stay tuned!

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Show garden bamboo


For this update, I have created another video blog. I managed to find an application that allowed me to show a presentation/image whilst I speak (called Manycam). Please check it out. In this video blog, I am talking about the choice of bamboo that I will be using in the show garden. These are varieties of Borinda, Fargesia and Semiarundinaria. It's a bit long, so I promise that next time I will try to be brief and get to the point. I find myself yapping endlessly sometimes. Hope you enjoy it, and please comment. As comments might help me make the videos more interesting and less boring :-)

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Another day at work: en VO!!!

Aujourd'hui, je vais faire un effort pour mes amis francophones en faisant un posting en français. Vous allez vous régaler en voyant les fautes orthographes et grammaires partout...

Tout d'abord, je voudrais vous annoncer une petite nouvelles. Je viens de recevoir un email du patron d'une chaîne de pépinière anglaise concernant la possibilité d'un sponsorship! Rien n'est certain, mais c'est un début.

Bon, on commence par une discussion de l'évolution de mon design qui a été évoqué dans la communiqué datée 31 janvier. Sur la première image que vous voyez ci-droite, on peut constater qu'il y a des jardinières rectangulaires par terre. Ces jardinières seront construites en bois, peintes en blanc, et elles seront remplir par 3 'petit jardins' (jardin sablé, jardin alpines et jardin galets/caillous). La hauteur de ces jardinières seront irréguliere, pour donner une impression d'être dans un térrain montaigneux... j'espère en tout cas :-) Apart ça, il n'y plus beaucoup de changements. Je vous montre une autre image qui montre comment ces jardinières sont étendre au fond du jardin aussi:

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Keni's first press release

The Three Counties Agriculture Society, the co-organiser of the Malvern Spring Gardening Show, has just released a communique regarding my show garden! Have fun reading it.