Jen Stuart-Smith

Despite working on a field of flowers, Bek and I still like to broaden our horizons. The other day we were invited to the Bee Symposium, a gathering of bee fans and campaigners, organised by Neal’s Yard and Sam Roddick. Sam is the daughter of Anita Roddick, who founded the Body Shop, and is a […]

On Saturday we got to play with flowers at Yalding Gardens, as part of our wedding bouquet and buttonhole course. Our plan to use peonies from Buston Manor was thwarted by the recent dry weather, but our attendees (doesn’t that sounds grand) said they liked our ‘BG plot selection’ even more. Everyone’s bouquet looked different,

Despite last week’s excitement over large agricultural machinery, our new self-propelled seed planter is much more up our street. Or should we say furrow? With a bit of practice, we got up quite some speed, and managed to plant nearly all of our annuals (cornflowers, larkspur, nigella, sunflowers) in one day. Heath Robinson eat your

This week we’ve expanded our plot, to make room for more annuals. We’re planting such lovelies as: cornflower, larkspur, sunflowers and bupleurum, so there’s lots of goodies for us and our PYO customers. It’ll certainly make a pretty backdrop. Thanks to our neighbour, James Forknall, and his huge tractor, it only took a short while

One of Bek’s wigwams… at Yalding Gardens, in their topiary border. Bek really likes to use colour, and also loves stripes. You can definitely see her influence here!

This morning I arrived on the doorstep of the gardening gurus, David and Anke Way, to let them know that we had come to cut their willow (which they had kindly offered us). “Oh, is it just you?” asked David. “Oh no,” I said. “I’ve brought the big guns.” The “big guns” being Uncle Alan,