Malvern: the show

You may find this difficult to believe, but I didn't spend all my time gossiping with other bloggers at the Malvern show. No, no, not at all - I spent quite a lot of time looking at the exhibits. And quite a lot of time eating sausage sandwiches, drinking cups of tea and trying to ignore the fact that the weather was absolutely awful. It was cold, wet and deeply miserable.
I arrived at the show with VP and instantly dragged her off, against her better judgement, to the Floral Marquee. "Much better to go later," she said, resisting my arm-tugging, "when it's not so crowded." "But it's under cover," I said. "Good point," she said.
We both had severe attacks of what I'm going to call Malvernitis. Patientgardener has already posted about the phenomenon, and it goes like this. You see fabulous plant on nursery stand. You go ooh or aah (depending on personality/gender). You think it is just the thing for non-existent blank space in your garden. You look to see if said plant is for sale. You find it is not. You ask nice friendly nursery person if they have one. They say no, they have sold out. This is because (in VP's case) Carol Klein has been on Gardeners' World the night before and named whatever it is you want as her Plant of the Show. You mutter a rude word.
I also suffered an attack of Flower Show Amnesia. Emerging finally from the Floral Marquee, I said proudly to VP: "I didn't buy anything!" "Yes, you did," she spluttered, "you ordered some tulips from Bloms Bulbs!" Oh yes, so I did ...
The Floral Marquee was my favourite part of the show. There were just so many wonderful exhibits. I went back another couple of times, and I was still seeing new things on the third circuit. These are the plants or exhibits that caught my eye:

Giant Turkish rocket from Rebekah's Vegetable Seed, above, and their stand, below

A black-leaved dandelion on the Cotswold Garden Flowers stand (Taraxacum rubrifolium, I think). I thought it would be a wonderful prank to have some in the lawn on my open day ("Goodness, what is that weed?" "That's not a weed! Surely you recognises the very rare Taraxacum rubrifolium?") I also rather coveted the rheum, below, which is 'Hadspen Crimson'. Rheums were big at the show. Very big...

This conifer nursery, Owens Bros, had won a gold medal for their display, which I thought was absolutely exquisite. I think it would have converted even the most die-hard conifer-hater. The photograph probably makes it look bigger than it was - the stand was about the size of a large dining room table.

So what did I buy? I bought a little acer, 'Orange Dream'. I'd wanted 'Autumn Moon' but it was quite expensive (£25) so I settled for the cheaper one instead. I have an 'Orange Dream' in my garden already, so I know it's quite reliable and easy.

When I went back to collect it, Rob and his business partner Liam came with me, so I ended up not only picking up my acer, but was also persuaded into buying a dwarf larch from Owens Bros and a Tetrapanax papyrifera 'Rex' that Rob spotted on the Cotswold Garden Flowers stand.

Memo to self: must never go in Floral Marquee with Rob and Liam again.

Malvern: The Sorority House

My first sight of Gail and Frances was when I caught sight of them waving at me in the Design For Living Theatre tent. "Goodness," I thought. "I know Americans are friendly, but that's so nice that they recognised me."

I rushed over to say hello, and to ask which was Gail and which was Frances. They looked at me in a rather bemused fashion. "Who are you?" they demanded. They'd been waving at VP, who - unknown to me - had been standing right behind me watching the show.

Behind them, in the next row, two other women smiled tentatively at me. Yolanda and Ewa! VP came over to join us and thus my sorority house weekend began.

The show we had been watching was about chickens, and involved Joe Swift, Cleve West and James Alexander-Sinclair - otherwise known, according to the compere, as the loud one, the smouldering one and the posh one. They were talking to a chicken expert, which involved holding chickens and, if you were Cleve, having them poo down your leg. I never realised chickens did such big poos. I thought they laid pellets that were then neatly packed into tubs ready for sale in garden centres.

I'd arrived quite late at Malvern - around 5pm - as I'd been working late the previous night on the UK general election coverage. I only had time to have a quick peek as I passed the various exhibits but I was thrilled by what I saw. School gardens, designer gardens, a floral marquee and loads and loads of things to buy.

The show closed at 6pm, and people were hungry, tired and cold so we headed off to the Sorority House (aka the Lighthouse). Everyone was raving about how lovely it was and I wasn't disappointed. It smelt gorgeous too - a lovely woody smell - and thanks to the solid fuel stove, it was warm and cosy inside. There was plenty of room in the big kitchen to sit round the table and talk. This was just as well, because that was what we did most of the time.

Patient Gardener was our host that evening, so we all headed over to her house with contributions of food and drink (and in my case, seedlings). You could tell it was a garden blogging party though, as most people headed straight outside rather than towards the wine bottles.

I've seen pictures of PG's garden many times on her blog, but of course it looked slightly different in real life. It looked fantastic, in fact, with wonderful colour contrasts and the most incredibly healthy-looking plants.

I was very envious of PG's tulips, above, and I loved the combination of apricot tulips, below, and the soft dusty blue of the rosemary

There were old friends and new faces at the party: Zoe, Anna, Karen, Karen's sister-in-law Dobby, Lia, Elizabethm, Michelle. I was dying to meet everyone but was slightly overcome by the amazingness of it all. I'd be introduced to someone and find myself standing staring at them in a rather gormless fashion because I was just so entranced by the idea of putting faces to names. So if you were there, and I didn't get time to talk to you or seemed remarkably stupid, many apologies.

Victoria: What are you all looking at?

Yolanda: We're not looking at anything. We're sunbathing.

Victoria: Aha.

Gail: Have you never seen turtles on a log?

A great partnership

The creative world is full of great partnerships. Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and George. And now we have Victoria and VP. We've collaborated on a garden guide for this Saturday's Independent, so if you're UK-based, make a note to rush out and buy it.

The 50 Best series runs each week in The Information section of The Independent. This week, the 50 Best is Gardens.

It's always very difficult to choose one's favourite gardens. There are so many, for a start, and there may be gardens that, while not generally considered world-class, may touch something inside you that draws you to that place.

Alternatively, some of the great gardens may leave you cold. They may lack intimacy, or that sense of retreat that many of us treasure. Or they may be so manicured that you find yourself longing for the odd weed or shaggy bits around the edges.

Personally, while I admire the great 18th-century landscapes created by Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton and William Kent from an aesthetic point of view, they don't really strike an emotional chord in me.

It's a bit like looking at a beautiful painting - which indeed is what they were intended to replicate. The nobility of the time came home from their Grand Tours and wanted something that would reproduce the antique glories they had seen in Rome and Greece, as depicted in the classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain.

I'm much more drawn to the cosier, more domestic scale of gardens such as Great Dixter, or Sissinghurst. I like gardens that take you on a journey through archways and round corners, rather than something that is designed to be seen from a rather grand drawing-room.

I'm saying all this because I'm very conscious that people may not agree with our choices. On the other hand, VP and I are not setting out to become garden critics, nor are we aiming at a specialist, garden-enthusiast audience.

We're trying to encourage people to get out and see things, and because of this we've split the list into five sections: must-see gardens, rose gardens, kitchen gardens, gardens for walks and gardens for children.

I'm very grateful to VP for finding time in her busy schedule to help me with this. She manages to do so much, she reminds me of one of those circus performers who keeps plates spinning on the end of a pole.

I am hopeless at spinning plates. In fact, I'm very good at breaking them - I broke three the other day while we were having a barbecue without any practice whatsoever.

Well, he gets my vote

No, not Nick Clegg, but Matthew Wilson, presenter of Landscape Man, which began this evening on Channel 4. To be honest, I was a bit put off by the advance publicity, which made it sound like Ground Force on a grand scale. But the programme itself did not disappoint.

This week's episode was about Keith and Ros Wiley and their amazing garden at Wildside. Keith is the former head gardener at The Garden House and Ros is a painter. As well as creating the garden, they also run a nursery, so they're experienced horticulturalists. But Wildside is a garden on a vast scale.

Created from a flat four-acre site, Keith has sculpted the land into a series of hills and hummocks, precipices and ponds. The area of garden that is already planted up is beautiful - a naturalistic sea of waving grasses and flowers. Matthew followed the couple, who live in a "glorified shed" on site, as they created the next phase of the garden - a water garden and a Mexican courtyard while battling with lack of cash and in Ros's case, tendonitis from too much weeding.

The programme had some similarities with Grand Designs, Kevin McCloud's series about building houses. There was a lot of will-they, won't-they-make-it? to heighten the dramatic tension. But basically it was a story of one man's dream - to impose his vision on the surrounding landscape and by doing so, put down the roots of a new life.

It was fascinating and moving and above all, satisfyingly intelligent viewing. (Though I could have done with a bit more about the plants.)

Personally, I could have watched six programmes about the Wileys. Well done, Matthew!

More dash than ash

My friend Ollie - scourge of bamboo roots, layer of paving stones and lender of pressure washers - is one of the Stranded. He flew out to Heraklion, on the island of Crete, on a working trip last Wednesday and was supposed to fly back last Friday but was delayed by the eruption of the Icelandic volcano.

After hanging around waiting for news for a couple of days, he was told by EasyJet that even if the restrictions lifted, he would not get a flight home until this weekend.

So, never one to sit around twiddling his thumbs, he set off an odyssey across the Mediterranean. On Sunday night, he caught the overnight ferry (nine hours) from Crete to Piraeus, the port outside Athens. Then he took the bus across Greece to the western port of Patra(s).

From Patra, he took the overnight ferry (21 hours) to the Italian port of Ancona. He arrived this morning and immediately took a train to Bologna, where he was advised to make for Milan, as extra trains for Paris were being laid on there.

As I write this, he is - I hope - on a train from Milan to the French capital, which gets in around 9am tomorrow. When he gets to Paris, he can either try to get a seat on a London-bound Eurostar train (fully booked until Thursday) or make for Calais and hope that he can wheedle his way on to a ferry across the Channel.

Along the way, he has made friends with four other Victims of the Volcano. Thanks to the internet and mobile phones, they have kept in touch throughout the journey, and the first two to reach Milan bought the precious tickets for Paris for all five. I sense a lifetime's friendship being forged here.

I'm confident Ollie will be home by the weekend. But just in case he hits any snags, please join me in cheering him on. Go, Ollie!

Now you see it, now you don't

I've never been a great one for garden gadgets. I'm not crazy about the idea of using electrical power unnecessarily, when a bit of elbow grease would do the job just as well. I once tried out a friend's leaf-blower and I swear my arm vibrated for about three days afterwards. But if you think this attitude a tad puritanical in today's labour-saving age, you'll be delighted to hear that I have succumbed to the lure of the pressure washer.
I haven't bought one, just borrowed one. The paving outside had got to the stage where I risked breaking my leg every time I ventured out. A combination of long winters and wet summers, combined with bird food and the avian digestive products arising from it, had turned the terrace into something resembling a dark-green ice rink. So a friend very kindly lent me their Karcher washer.

What a revelation! You can see the difference in the picture below - the dark areas are where I have yet to clean. Apparently you can use detergent in the washer, but I drew the line at that, which meant that I was left with a kind of green acne which required a lot of scrubbing.

I did ask myself whether I felt a bit guilty using all that water. Nope, I replied. Not after a winter like this one.

I have scrubbed the patio before using a stiff broom and a hose, but it was nothing like as effective and 10 times as much work. Mind you, even using a pressure washer was hard work. Really hard work. (Just in case you thought I was taking the easy way out.)

Here we are (below), all wet and clean. (Meanwhile, I am all wet and dirty...)

Ta-dah! The finished result (below). I don't think it's looked so clean since the day it was laid.

Ironically, I really like the lichen-encrusted, mossy look, with plants growing in between the paving slabs. It looks great in a country garden, or on York stone. I just don't think it works very well on the sort of plain concrete slabs that I have.

I also think that when you have a jungly garden, a plain area, such as the lawn or the terrace, acts as a visual breathing space that throws into contrast the leafy mayhem around it. So will I be using the pressure washer again? As Lauren Bacall once reputedly said to the Shah of Iran: "You bet your ass."

PS: Could I please apologise to everyone for not commenting on your comments or on your blogs? I love reading them and I think it's only good manners to reply if someone has taken the trouble to say something. However, something odd has happened to my life recently - there seems to be hardly any of it. (I'm writing this when I should really be doing something else.) Finding time to keep pace with the garden is a struggle, let alone writing about it.

However, I wanted to say how much I appreciate your input and encouragement. Thanks, everybody.