We welcomed the return of Chris Day to the club for our November meeting.
Chris Day is a professional horticulturalist who has worked in commercial horticulture, garden centre retailing and worked on, written for and edited consumer gardening magazines, including Amateur Gardening and Garden Ideas. For many years Chris was at Buckingham Garden Centre but has recently moved to be Nursery Manager at Alban Hill Nurseries near Olney.
He gave us an interesting, illustrated talk on the history of the flower border. We travelled from Roman gardens, such as that reimagined at Fishbourne, to medieval herb gardens, like the Chelsea Physic Garden, then on to the larger, formal gardens such as those designed for our great country houses. The Victorians brought in lots of colour and new plants from abroad, while glasshouse technology meant that more exotic blooms were introduced.
By the twentieth century ‘rooms’ in gardens became popular and by the 1950s the advent of plastic plant pots meant that it was much easier to buy plants from nurseries, along with newly introduced compost in bags.
Gardening, like so many other pursuits, certainly has its fashions!