How to create a show garden - day two

Well we’ve just spent another 9 hours out at the Westpoint show ground completing our display. It’s hard to know where the time goes as at first glance we had most plants in place at the end of last night but believe me, no time was wasted!

Our first job was to moss around visible pot covers and position cork around the edges of our display to hide the plant pots. In doing this job you inevitably create spaces, find gaps and switch things around. Fairly soon Gary, Rob and I (Tammy) were whisking our remaining plants away from each other to fill our gaps! Despite believing we had brought too many plants out we were soon left with none. James from our Clyst St Mary garden centre gave us a hand too in the morning and soon found himself getting the idea of stacking and packing the plants in.

Mid-morning we had a visit from Brian, our tractor driver, to say goodbye as today was his last day before he enjoys retired life. Brian has worked for us for 40 years and so saying goodbye was not easy for any of us. Good luck Brian!

Back to our show garden, we decided to substitute the bird table for a dove cote. Nothing but the best will do and we’re glad we did as it stands out much better. We labelled all the plants, dead headed flowers, watered the plants, put up rope around the perimeter, added props to our table set, topped up the pond, finished stocking up our sales area, raked the grass and had a coffee! Meanwhile everyone was asking us, “what is the wooden frame for at the front of the stand?”…well Gary kept this little nugget a surprise until the end. I’m not going to reveal all on here now – come back tomorrow for the final photos!

So that’s it, judging is at 7am tomorrow morning and the show opens two hours later. For those of you who would like to meet the creators of the stand Gary will be there tomorrow and on Saturday and the full team will be there on Saturday. We hope you like it and most importantly get inspiration for your garden. All the plants look amazing (biased I know but they really do) and they are all grown here in Exeter by our amazing nursery team.