Gold

Hillier Gardens won a Gold Medal at the Chelsea Flower Show this year. Today we had the chance to go along to the local Hillier Centre to see one of their managers talk about how they go about putting their display together. It was an excellent talk and fascinating information. They have several teams with up to about 40 people working on the site for 12 days. Huge lorries are dispatched to arrive at 9, 10, and 11 day after day. In the end they sent some 4,500 plants, using about 2,500 thereof; there was 35 tons of rock, 7 tones of bark, and heavens knows what else. The chap also talked about some of the specific stars of their display - Acer Moonrise, some dianthus, some hydrangeas and so forth. It was an excellent couple of hours.

Leaving Hillier we found that a couple of new acers had leapt into our trolley.

The afternoon was spent with a touch of pruning the existing acer s, then up to the study to rebuild "peregrine". The rebuild, using the new configurator, took about 30 minutes from scratch. Next step will be to automate the backup of the database before the Gorse Fox starts to build the blog.