Growing up in a world of change

ITS one of the highlights of the gardening calendar. John Grainger looks forward to the Harrogate Spring Flower Show.

MARTIN Fish is a horticulturist on a mission. Now in only his second year as director of the Harrogate Flower Shows, he is fairly fizzing with ideas to improve them. The Spring Flower Show – April 14-17 – is still three weeks away, but he is already looking ahead to future events.

“I want it to be the best gardening show in the country,” he says. “Not necessarily the biggest, but the best. I want it to be the complete gardening experience.”

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He fears, though, that the spring and autumn shows, which have an excellent reputation nationally, remain under-appreciated closer to home.

“I just want to make people realise what they’ve got right on their doorstep,” he says. “Speaking to local businesspeople last year, I asked how many of them had been to the Harrogate Flower Show before, and only one or two put up their hands. But then I asked how many had been to the Chelsea Flower Show and a sea of hands went up.

“So Chelsea is obviously the show to go to, but what a lot of people don’t realise is that the exhibitors we have here at Harrogate will be at Chelsea in a month’s time – and we’re a lot cheaper.”

Martin’s aim, though, is not to match or eclipse the London event in terms of size. Visitor numbers for Harrogate’s spring show hover at around 58,000 – about 100,000 fewer than Chelsea – and Martin would be happy for it to settle at just 60,000 every year: “Any bigger and it might spoil the feel of the show. People often comment on how friendly it is.”

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The Harrogate Spring and Autumn Flower Shows, which are organised by the North of England Horticultural Society (NEHS), were never meant to compete with their southern counterparts. When the NEHS was set up 100 years ago, one of its stated aims was to arrange first-class shows where northern exhibits could be judged by standards appropriate to our colder climate.

It’s been doing that very successfully ever since, but lately it’s been about much more than just the pursuit of the perfect pelargonium. Plants and flowers are still very much at the heart of the shows, but there also appears to be a decidedly un-Chelsea drive to take the “haughty culture” out of horticulture.

This year, for example, the Gardening With Nature display will feature a sustainability-themed garden created from recycled materials by young apprentices and students of art, construction and landscape design from Harrogate College.

“It’ll be interactive, so as well as enjoying looking at it, you’ll be able to do things like make electricity by pedalling a cycle-generator,” says Martin.

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“The whole marquee will be filled with trees; we want it to look like a leafy glade – a natural area, but under cover.

“We also want to encourage educational content, so all the people doing demonstrations and mini-workshops will also be relating it to children.”

Learning from the experts is an important theme at Harrogate. Throughout the Spring Flower Show, there’ll be one-to-one gardening advice available from NEHS council members and exhibitors, and the Garden Roadshow will run from 11am to 4pm daily.

“It’ll be a bit like Gardeners’ Question Time, but running continuously,” says Martin. “We try to pitch it in such a way that no-one feels intimidated by it.”

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Horticulture students from colleges all over the North will be showing how much they have already learned when they enter the NEHS’s garden design competition.

With sustainability as their theme, each participating institution will take a different aspect of Highgrove (the Prince of Wales’s Gloucestershire estate) as their inspiration – an innovation to which Prince Charles, who became patron of the NEHS last year, has given his personal blessing.

Martin says: “Entrants have to submit a draft design, and we’ll select eight of them to exhibit at the show. Those eight won’t be in competition with each other, though – in theory, they could all take gold.

“We’ll also have a People’s Choice award, for which visitors to the show will be able to vote.”

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Visitors will also be able to take a lead role in the Kitchen Garden Live area, where they can learn about growing fruit, vegetables and herbs. It’s a feature which last year proved to be a hit with a gardening public whose imagination was long ago captured by the dirt-under-the-fingernails, grow-your-own ethos.

Similarly, the Cookery Theatre – which was successfully trialled last year – will be bigger. It will feature a succession of chefs cooking fresh, locally-produced, seasonal fruit and vegetables and will be hosted in the food marquee by last year’s British Culinary Federation’s Chef of the Year, Stephanie Moon, who is consultant chef at Harrogate’s Rudding Park estate.

It’s all eye-catching stuff, and should serve to widen the show’s appeal far beyond its corps of hardy perennial supporters. The innovations, though, come at a price, which – fortunately for ticket-buyers – is largely met by sponsors, who are themselves an innovation.

“Until a couple of years ago, we didn’t really have any sponsors but we’d like more of them, because they allow us to develop new areas,” says Martin.

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“Last year, we launched the Corporate Club. Members receive 10 tickets for each of the year’s flower shows, as well as other benefits, like access to the hospitality lounge and parking privileges.

“Those who have been have thoroughly enjoyed themselves. They often hadn’t realised that it’s as good as it is.”

He’s hoping that the Duchess of Northumberland will be similarly impressed. She’s due to visit the show for the first time this year in her capacity as the new president of the NEHS.

As a passionate advocate of the “hands-on”, educational approach to gardening that Martin is helping to develop at the NEHS, she seems perfect for the role. In fact, she herself created The Alnwick Garden, a £42m extravaganza complete with huge tree-house and world-renowned poison garden, at the family seat of Alnwick Castle.

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Her involvement is quite a coup and crowns a year that started last spring with Prince Charles becoming patron and has also seen the NEHS move its headquarters to the brand-new, award-winning Regional Agriculture Centre – just in time for its centenary year. The Centre, which is at the Great Yorkshire Showground on Harrogate’s eastern edge, has been hailed as Yorkshire’s greenest building.

“It’s lovely working here,” says Martin, “but it’s also much more practical. It makes sense to be working right here, at the Flower Show venue.

The move appears to have unleashed creative forces in Martin and his team, and the ideas keep flowing: he wants the NEHS to go out to schools and help them with their projects; he wants it to get more involved with smaller horticultural shows across the North.

At the Spring Flower Show, he plans to bring in more truly gardening content, rather than diversifying too much. He’d like to develop the show gardens into something bigger – “people love them and draw inspiration from them” – and he wants to expand the fruit and veg side too.

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Although he appreciates that much of this runs the risk of alienating the more traditionally-minded gardeners, he insists there’s still just as much as ever for them to come and see. He’s equally clear, though, that change is inevitable if the Spring Flower Show is to thrive.

“It will always evolve,” he says. “My background is in gardening, and a garden is never finished; there is always more to be done.

“People are so hungry to learn about gardening – I don’t think it will ever stand still.”