Car crash of a day.  Nic, Maggy Howarth, Chris Payne and I arranged to meet at my house in Grange to discuss the design of Maggy’s mosaic and Chris’s Pergola and to choose the site in my garden for the Apiary and mosaic after the show. This was Maggy’s first visit to my house.  There was torrential rain and all the roads into Grange were blocked because of a crashed BMW on Main St.  The poor driver was taken away by Air Ambulance.  We had to abandon our cars in Grange and walk the steep half mile to the house in the downpour.  Then a further trudge through the rain as we struggled to find  a suitable site in my garden for the Apiary. I was so looking forward to showing the garden to Maggy, but she ended up being thoroughly soaked.  But we made good progress with our design ideas and will meet again in a week.

Jonathan

Why Bees?

For years I have been meaning to keep bees. It’s one of those resolutions which I would think about in the New Year and by the time I’d remembered in May it would be too late.  The need to keep bees and to garner their honey is part of my drive to become self-sufficient.  Although I earn my living from hotel-keeping my real passions are gardening and farming.  In the middle of my garden, which is on the Cumbrian coast in Grange-over-Sands is a walled kitchen garden which provides me and my family (Margaret and our daughters, Joanna, Georgina and Sara) with all the fruit and vegetables we need.  The surplus goes to our hotels.  On the farm, which is further up the coast at Millom, we keep rare-breed cattle, pigs and sheep, and the occasional chicken, duck, goose and turkey for meat and hens for eggs.   Since we bought a Jersey cow last year we also have our own milk, butter, cream, cheese, yoghurt and ice-cream.  Honey is essential to bring us that little bit closer to self-sufficiency.

The vogue word is Sustainability.  I’m a keen member of the Slow Food Movement whose motto is Good, Clean and Fair- which is another way of saying Sustainable.  We want the things which we eat to be natural, local and if possible produced by ourselves, and definitely free from chemicals and additives.

So bees were on my mind when Nicola and I sat down to think about designing a show garden.  Nicola has the same passion for sustainability as I do.  She lives on a small-holding near Kirkby Lonsdale with her architect  husband Tony and three children, Molly (12), Archie (10) and Louis (7), where they grow their own veg and keep an esoteric collection of animals. 

The Beekeeper’s garden has as its focal point an Apiary which is modelled on the bee-house in one of  Shirley Hibberd’s  books.  Nowadays no-one has heard of Shirley Hibberd, but he (yes, it’s a he) was one of the greatest figures of Victorian gardening, as famous then as Alan Titchmarsh is now.  I’m nuts about him and have a complete collection of all his writing as well as a portrait of him in my hall.  In Shirley Hibberd’s day everyone kept bees and everyone grew their own fruit and vegetables. Our garden reflects that passion-  and I hope you’ll agree that a practical and sustainable garden can be beautiful as well as useful.

Links:

http://www.bestlakesbreaks.co.uk/

http://www.lindisfarm.co.uk/

http://www.yewbarrowhouse.co.uk/

http://www.damsondesign.com/