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Gardens Show


Rob Roy

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Nowhere near Limoges unfortunately but this did remind me of a Chelsea exhibitor I saw on the BBC programme last night. A lady called Ginny Blom who said she was half french and went on to say that 'the French are plonkers'.  This was in the context of gardening, I hasten to add, and what she meant was that the Englsish style of gardening is for drifts of plants that merge and the French style is to 'plonk' plants so that they each have their separate space with a nice neat patch of earth between.  Thinking about gardens I have seen on both sides of the channel it seemed to me that there is a lot of truth in this.

While we're on the topic of garden shows I came across this site the other day which gives a lot of ideas of gardens to visit in Brittany and elsewhere in France. http://hortiauray.com/Bretagne.htm

Liz

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Yes! I saw this and smiled. It's absolutely true. I can't stand the plonking style of gardening but I think - unless you inhabited something with gardens styled by Jekyll - the plonking tendency was very much how provincial British (well, English anyway) gardening was 30 years ago. Trees in the middle of manicured lawns. Random rose bushes carefully placed along otherwise sparsely inhabited drives. So no doubt gardening will evolve here too.
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 Isn't this fashion to plant in drifts a clever ruse to get us to buy more plants ?

I tend to look for a 'good potfull' that might divide or go to our local big plant nursery where they sell things that have just past their season reduced, this does mean waiting a year but at present its working OK, although I got a little carried away giving the lamium 'white nancy' a haircut  and halved the size of the plant - whoops !

Heres the Iris from last year, bloomed today !

[IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y194/russethouse/24.jpg[/IMG]

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