BBC Gardeners World Live - Press Preview

So today's plan is, I've just got here, just checked in at the hotel, had some lunch and now I'm off to the Press Preview, which apparently is, and it's also a Garden Media Guild networking event, and so I get to meet everyone else that's members of the Guild that have signed up as well, and as part of that we get to meet the judges ahead of them judging the show gardens, and we get to learn the criteria on how they judge, and then we get to have a sneaky peek around the show gardens and around the whole show, so I'm super excited and I'm really looking forward to the show opening tomorrow and then having another proper look round and buying lots of bits and pieces for myself. So yeah, I'm going to take you around with me, hopefully as much as I can today, and as much as I can tomorrow. I'm also interviewing Adam Frost tomorrow, super excited, and then, yes, and then back again on Sunday, to interview Francis Tophill and Marcus Bean. So yes, there'll be lots of me and I'll be showing you around the whole thing, so come with me! So I'm just coming up to the Thrive Garden, which is absolutely stunning, and I'll take you there now, you can have a look. So I'm currently with Amanda, who's the regional centre manager for Birmingham, and so she's going to take me around the Thrive Garden, we're going to have a good look round, she's going to tell me the story behind the garden and what they were thinking when they created it. So hi Amanda! Hi! Hello! So yeah, if you'd like to take me around the garden, that'd be fantastic, and then you can just, yeah, show me around really. So this is our lovely garden, it's a beautiful border, and we're here at the NEC, it was designed by our students on our Grow and Learn programme, so, and they are from Chadds Grove School. We have eight students that come to us with physical and learning disabilities, part of the programme is two years, and they deliver, we deliver a Level 1 in Practical Abort Skills, which they nailed in a year, which was amazing. So we decided, what are we going to do with them this year then? So we thought, I know, we'll come to Gardeners World. So we encouraged them to design a garden, the brief for the garden was 50 years of television, so we asked them to list all the different television and films that they could think of in the last 50 years, or perhaps that their mothers and fathers knew, and we went through everything right from Spongebob Squarepants down to Avatar and lots of things in between. And because of what the charity does with social and therapeutic horticulture, working with those with physical and learning disabilities and those with mental ill health or isolated and disadvantaged, the life and times of Miss Potter seemed to fit the bill for the charity, because she went through her bereavement and her isolation and lots of other things. So we thought that that fitted quite well, so the students chose that as the theme. So as part of that then, we had a really lovely movie session with popcorn and everything so they could watch the Miss Potter movie, which reaffirmed their choice for them. And then we went down to the application process and to properly designing the garden. So the garden is split into two halves, and the left hand side depicts the story of Miss Potter's life in London and her experiences with writing her books, and her journey on writing her books. The right hand side depicts the tale of her living in Hilltop when she moved to the Lake District. The for sale sign is to represent the purchase of Hilltop and lots of other farms. The living wall at the back is to represent the mountains in the Lake District, and the blue plants are for the lakes themselves. The tree symbolises that when she was living both in London and at Hilltop, she liked sitting under a tree to write her stories, which was really amazing. The suitcases are to represent her journey and her moving to the Lake District, and the ring is for her engagement to Mr. Warne. So the railway track in the middle is really important and symbolises the moods that Miss Potter experienced in life through her journey. So we start off with the reds when she was at home with her parents, and that was quite a contented time in her life, but she wanted to get on and write some of her books. So we go through the journey, and then as you can see the colours darken, and they go to a really deep black with the black lily turf grass, and that was when Mr. Warne passed away unfortunately, and she was incredibly depressed and bereaved. But when she moved to Hilltop, you can see her moods got slightly better, and she came to terms with the loss of Mr. Warne, and eventually settled down and started writing under her tree again with her paintbrushes, doing her illustrations, and then as you can see the garden goes into the bright colours, where she became far more content and happy with living in the Lake District and meeting her future husband, William Meadis. So that's generally our story. The picture books, you can see we have lovely pictures of the students on their journey, and if you can see the other side there's some illustrations that they've created themselves, drawn freehand from the Miss Potter books. So the students were here with us to help us with the build, so they've grown all the vegetables in our garden themselves, and we've transported them here, and then they've planted it for us. They chose all the rocks and they were all numbered in sequence so we'd know how to reassemble them when we got here. They've helped us plant the trees and everything else, they've been amazing. They've sifted the gravel because we brought all that from the garden that we have, so at the end of the show we're going to take the garden lock, stock and barrel and display it in our garden in Kingsheath Park, so that on Fridays when we do our guided tours people will see the garden that we built at the NEC for Gardeners Guild. So that's generally our story, we've been supported by lots of people, but the students have been totally amazing, totally amazing, I can't tell you the effort they've put in. They've spent months getting these and looking after them, they've been utterly, utterly amazing and they've spent so much time and have thoroughly enjoyed it, it's been a real journey for us and for them. It looks incredible, and the fact that they've done it. We are incredibly proud of them, incredibly proud of them, it's fantastic, I'm in awe totally, they're wonderful. Hopefully it'll keep them motivated to keep going as well and keep pushing on and get it ingrained in them. For some of these students it might be, the level one in practical board skills might be the only qualification they'll ever get in life. One of the young lads that was doing this garden has been promised a job with his uncle when he finishes school, because he needs to do a practical thing, so yeah, what more can you ask for? That's fantastic, that's exactly what you want from it though isn't it, to have a career out of it, they can create a career out of it. That's Thrive at its best. Yeah, exactly, that's the true story I think of Thrive and what they can do. So it's been an amazing journey and an incredibly valuable one and something that, as I say, we're really, really proud of. Fantastic, thank you so much for taking me around and showing me, explaining the story really. It's a great pleasure, thank you. It's a fantastic story, thank you. Hi everyone, so I've just come across Alex at Crafty Plants, who's got an amazing air plants display, so I'm just going to speak to Alex and find out a bit more about how they're finding set up and a bit more about the plants. So hi Alex. Hi there, how are you? Thank you for agreeing to talk to me. No problem. Yeah, if you could just tell me a bit about the set up, how it's going and a bit about the company and the plants really. Yeah, so set up, well yesterday of course we come here in bare stand, nothing at all and basically we got our main tree, which we put together at home and that was the main part we sort of had to build and put together. Bring it here, effectively flat packed, build it up, then just hit it with plants. Wow. So you just go for it. It looks amazing. So, no real planning on where the plants are going to go, it's just a case of where they look best, you know, and that kind of thing. I like it. Sounds good to me. Yeah. Fantastic. And these are the little guys that we grow in our nursery, our little air plants. They don't need soil, they don't have roots. That's amazing. They basically live off the air. That's pretty, isn't it? So there's literally no excuses for people if they want to have plants at home and they go, well, I can't do it. Surely there's no excuse to these, are there? No, not at all. Not a little bit of care? Not at all. They tend to kill with kindness, basically. Over watering tends to be the biggest problem, but they don't need much, they can stand a lot of neglect. So how long does it take to get them to this stage in the nursery? Most of these are about three or four years old at this stage. So, you know, we grow a lot from little offsets, the little pups they give off. Yeah. So we grow a lot from that and we've also got some growing from seed and that takes quite a lot longer. A lot of these are basically from, as I say, little offsets from plants and I can't see any at the moment to show you the offsets, but there are some on there with the pups and everything. Ah, fantastic. Well, thank you very much and I will let you crack on and I will have a carry on looking around. Thank you very much. Cheers. I'm really proud of them. I'm really proud of the show. I think it's gone from spread to spread as it can get bigger and better, but we need your support and thank you so much for it. Enjoy the show. Thank you to all the press for coming. There's loads of you. Have you had some birthday cake? I haven't. So thank you very much. Write nice things because we worked really hard to put this on. So please do write some nice things and there's some brilliant gardens and thank you so much to everyone. Thank you. So happy Golden Birthday Garden World and here's to the next 50 years. Happy Birthday! I've had an absolutely amazing day. Press preview is now over. They've announced all the winners. We've had our cheeky little glass of Prosecco and our piece of celebration cake and now I'm going to head back to the hotel and just relax and have some dinner before the first open day tomorrow and interviewing Adam Frost and just have a good look around. I've already eyed up what I'm going to buy because that's a very good bonus of the press previews. You get to have a look around before it goes absolutely mental and you can eye up the plants you want to get. So there's lots of them to get, especially the air plants that you saw earlier and yeah, just have a look around all the gardens again. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you did, give it a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe and thank you very much for watching and I'll see you soon. Bye!