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On Tuesday 13 April, the first night of our new season, we had a full house in the Bradfield Village Hall with both existing members and new members filling every available seat. Our speaker, Matthew Wilson, was the big attraction. After a highly successful career with the Royal Horticultural Society as the Curator of two of the Society's great gardens, Hyde Hall in Essex and Harlow Carr in Yorkshire, and Head of Creative Gardening for the RHS, he is about to appear in a new series of television programmes called The Landscape Man on Channel 4 Television (starting on Thursday 22 April at 8pm). Matthew Wilson had been due to start our season in 2009 but the date coincided with the birth of his twins. We were introduced to them tumbling around on a bed at the start of Matthew's power point presentation. We were taken through Matthew's varied career which included being a meat porter and Sun newspaper reporter and then eventually into his life as a gardener. His parents, in fact, had run a cut flower business in the countryside and this is where Matthew had first fallen in love with the natural world. His talk to us was loosely based on the topic of gardening in a changing climate and introduced us to his philosophy of working with nature. He believes in planting in communities of plants so that they all share the same cultivation requirements and replacing fencing with hedging or a natural barrier of, for example, willow to create an environment where wild life can thrive. He was fascinating on the topic of the different climatic conditions in this country. Did anyone know that Essex has such low rainfall that you could classify it as a desert? I think we all found much to learn from Matthew's informative and highly entertaining talk.
The two other attractions of the evening were the superb display of plants produced by Julian Jones of Wolverton Plants and BGC member Peter Schedler's pre-book launch presentation on the South African native plants, aloes. Peter has produced two books, one on the art of aloes which includes some attractive paintings, including stamp designs using these plants, and a practical guide on growing aloes in this country. I personally never knew that there was such an exciting variety of these plants and Peter should be congratulated on a major piece of research and two lovely books.
Fenja Anderson

The meeting of the Bradfield Gardening Club on Tuesday 11th May was probably one of the best attended I can remember. Ninety six of us squeezed into the Village Hall to hear Fergus Garrett, the Head Gardener of Great Dixter in East Sussex, the famous garden of the late Christopher Lloyd, give his talk. Fergus was specially chosen as a favourite speaker by our members who filled in a questionnaire at the end of the 2009 season. We had all enjoyed his first talk to the Club some years ago and this second talk did not disappoint us. He proved to be an ideal choice for our 10th anniversary year: a fluent speaker with an intense love of his subject and a clear way of communicating his ideas. The images he showed of plants and plant combinations were of the highest quality and always related directly to his text.
Fergus's theme was planning a garden so that plants related intimately to one another, producing exciting contrasts of colour and shape. He told us that although Christopher Lloyd was always known for his use of colour - often bold and unconventional - it was shape and structure that was his first concern when planting out a garden. We were shown images of plant combinations that Fergus felt did not work and then the comparison with the style of planting that has given Great Dixter its reputation as an imaginative and innovative garden. He ended with a serious of pictures sent by Christopher Lloyd to Rosemary Verey, that other well-known gardening guru, showing Christopher in a brilliant yellow shirt posing in front of a pink flowering shrub and in a shocking pink shirt standing next to a shrub with bright yellow flowers. Fergus pointed out that Christopher was always true to himself and believed that the rules of conventional colour 'good taste' followed by Rosemary Verey could be broken in the interest of being daring and experimental. It was an amusing way to end an inspiring talk and I am sure we all returned home with many new ideas and plans for our own gardens. Fergus brought a small selection of unusual plants from the nursery at Great Dixter.

Sixty members of the Bradfield Gardening Club visited the garden at Hook End Farm, Upper Basildon on the evening of Tuesday, 8th June. David and Fiona Ambler gave us a warm welcome and we were free to wander round the romantic hillside garden with a glass of wine in hand. Fiona, apart from being a skilful gardener, is also a superb cook so her canapès made specially for the evening were an added treat. The speciality of Hook End Farm is a remarkable collection of roses - I think in the region of 300 different varieties - and these are grown everywhere. They cover walls and roofs of the farm house and outbuildings, they scramble over arches and bowers and in the hill side orchard, every tree is host to a different rose. On the evening of 8th June, may of the roses were still to bloom. It has been a late season due to the severe winter. But enough were flowering to give us all a foretaste of things to come and the setting of the farm and its garden, with views across the valley, was breathtaking. It was an excellent evening, much enjoyed by all who were there