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| Self portrait? Look carefully in the mirror... |
Finally, a bright, dry day and the ideal one to visit the RHS Tatton Park Flower Show and see how my colleagues from Reaseheath's 'Nature Squared' garden looked in reality. It was fabulous, but it's going to be the subject of another post, another day.
This may prove to be a turning point in the year as the day the weather changed for the better and summer began, but for me it feels like a turning point in another sense altogether.
Ever since I took voluntary redundancy from Stoke-on-Trent CAB, I've felt an awkward disconnect between the part of me that's still a welfare rights adviser at heart, and the part that wants to sow, grow and garden for a living. The activist and the horticulturalist elements have seemed to be at odds with each other; the green-fingered side of my personality clashing with the red flag waving side, and vice versa.
Today, however, peace broke out thanks to some extraordinary show gardens. These proved, without doubt, that you can dig for a cause with beautiful and inspirational results.
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| From a bleak place... |
The first of these was 'Metamorphosis' by the Women of HMP & YOI Styal examining the 'Journey of a Prisoner' and the role that a horticultural project growing flowers and food crops plays in the support and rehabilitation of some of the inmates.
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| ...to somewhere beautiful. |
Young designer Katherine Wells also addressed the practical role garden design can play in bringing inner calm and reflection, and thus rehabilitation, to offenders.
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| Ring the Changes |
Another beautiful concept was 'Ring the Changes' with its raised, wheelchair-accessible planting areas and potting benches produced as a collaboration between Bridge College, a specialist college for disabled students and Manchester College.
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| A World Without Torture |
Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture produced a garden that was both disturbing and uplifting, with its security fencing and barbed wire failing to contain a female figure releasing a dove to freedom and a better world.
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| Before... |
Groundwork and designer Chris Beardshaw showcased their work on inner city regeneration in 'Urban Oasis' with a clever 'before and after' design transforming a bleak patch of littered scrub into a community garden.
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| And after |
There were fewer 'back-to-backs' this year, but two really moved me almost to tears. 'Growing together' celebrated the Family Refugee Support Project in Liverpool and their innovative work with families seeking asylum creating a garden in Toxteth.
'Sister Suffragette' remembered that it is just 100 years since Parliament voted to allow votes for women, noting that it would be a further sixteen before women had the same voting rights as men.
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| The Journey towards Equality |
So after today, gardening no longer feels like a sell-out - it's clearly possible to mix plants and politics. The question now, of course, is how?
