Worcestershire
WR13 6NW UK
Tel: 01684 584900
For more information please contact:
Sharon Gilbert
Press & PR Manager
Telephone:
01684 584929
Fax:
01684 584930
E-mail: sharon@threecounties.co.uk
Editor's Notes:
The Malvern Autumn Show is a fund raising event for the Three Counties Agricultural Society (Registered charity no: 511868).
Garden Designers Bring Back The Buzz!
Landscape designers building show gardens at next month’s Malvern Autumn Show (26 & 27 September), are doing their bit to highlight the plight of the declining bee population, by incorporating them into their edible plots.
Bees pollinate around 90% of Britain’s apples, but are also important to other crops such as pears, raspberries and runner beans, and to wild flowers.
Their role in both ensuring a sustainable and profitable agriculture and maintaining a non-agricultural ecosystem is crucial, and the impact of losing them is potentially catastrophic.
Wet summers, intensive agriculture, pathogen attacks, reduced sowings of oilseed rape, and honey bee colony depopulation have all contributed to the worrying decline, so it has never been more vital to encourage both urban and country gardeners alike to literally put the buzz back into gardening!
East Sussex designer, Claire Potter is doing just that, with ‘The Honeybox’ – a soft rural garden with bee friendly planting and a modern beekeeper’s folly.
Claire’s garden features a mixed planting bed filled with borage, agastache, dahlia, monarda, hyssop, sage, lavender and even courgette – all of them a magnet for bees. There’s also a still water tank with water mint, tall wildflower meadow grass with a mown path, and the focal point, the modern honeybox.
The importance of saving the bee population also features strongly in the ‘Pastoral Allegory’ garden by West Midlands student designer, Paula Taylor-Kistner, who is including a reclaimed beehive in her design.
‘Pastoral Allegory’, sponsored by Dingle Nurseries, is an informal space full of edible plants and flowers, aromatics and herbs, which are functional as well as decorative. The garden includes a turf seat, a reclaimed picket fence and recycled wooden path structures for interest.
Paula is keen to become a small-scale beekeeper herself, and hopes the beehive will highlight the importance of using bee-friendly plants, and promoting the medicinal uses of honey.
Malvern’s show gardens are housed within and around the new Good Life Pavilion which embraces every element of the good life lifestyle including sustainable gardening, foraging and recycling, home crafts, energy efficiency, herbal healing, thrifty, wholesome cookery and small-scale livestock keeping.
Chris Greenwood of Poultry Park in Gloucestershire is tasked with creating ‘The Good Life Garden for Future Living’ – a modern take on the traditional edible plot, where a chicken coop, complete with living roof, sits happily within a sophisticated modern and low maintenance space, bringing self-sufficiency and the busy lifestyle together.
Chris’s garden also features a beehive, bee-friendly flower and vegetable beds and a bee’s favourite - an apple tree in blossom!
Other gardens for 2009 include ‘Nature’s Pantry’ by Andy Tudbury of Nottinghamshire-based Halcyon Days, which incorporates a ruin, and ‘From Table to Table’, by Helen Williams and Caroline Lennon of Herefordshire - and edible, and mainly organic space designed for wheelchair users and others who find it more comfortable to sit or stand when tending the garden.
Gloucestershire designer, Paul Hervey Brookes, winner of the prestigious 2009 Chris Beardshaw Scholarship, sponsored by Bradstone is designing the Bradstone Equinox Garden for the Show.
The space uses physical structures to explore the nature of the equinox (22 September 2009) and its relationship to Autumn and the traditional calendar.
The Malvern Autumn Show takes place at the Malvern Showground in Worcestershire on Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September 2009. There’s plenty of free parking and discounts for children (under 5’s free), families and groups.
For more information and interview opportunities, please contact:
Sharon Gilbert – Press & PR Manager
Three Counties Agricultural Society
Telephone: 01684 584929 (direct dial)
E-mail: sharon@threecounties.co.uk
Show Web Site and Box Office: www.threecounties.co.uk/malvernautumn
Ticket Hotline: +44 (0) 1684 584 900/924
This press release is available by e-mail and via RSS feed.
Released: 17/08/2009