Jen Stuart-Smith

While rootling around my home (once my 3 great aunties’ house) I found the following text, which is too good not to share. It was on an old postcard, marked Wannock Gardens, Polegate, Sussex – now, sadly and rather poignantly, a housing estate. Commandments of the Flowers Thou shalt learn to know the flowers of […]

There’s a great article in The Times this Saturday (27th) by Simon Barnes, about the demise of butterflies. Pertinent article, as July 20 to August 11 is this year’s Big Butterfly Count. Butterflies are what are known as ‘indicator species’ as they tell us a lot about how the rest of our environment is getting

After two wash-outs last year, if was fantastic to have such a warm sunny open day and so many visitors… When we set the date many months ago, we hadn’t predicted that Andy Murray would be playing in the Men’s Final at Wimbledon on the same day! Fortunately, everyone seemed to have planned ahead and

There’s so much to report, but I’ll keep it brief and let the photos do the talking. In the last few weeks we’ve had a photo shoot in a fancy hotel, talked to a huge group of fruit farmers about our flower plot, done talks, visited a TV company and bought some wonderful plants to

A couple of days after our open day, the sun came out… and so did our tulips! We’re fairly used to this kind of comedy timing. Equally we would hate our tulips to go to waste. With this in mind, anyone is welcome to come to our flower plot next Friday (May 10th) to pick

Watching 20 tonnes of crumbly, black, steaming compost tumble out of the back of a lorry is very satisfying and reminded me of a daydream I had over a decade ago. I was driving along a country lane looking at a large arable field and imagined tractors pulling trailers of black compost and covering the