LOST TATTON

Another year... another Tatton Park Flower Show
(This one in 2010)

This year we missed going to the RHS Flower Show at Tatton Park for the first time in many, many years. It had become one of the very few things that we actually habitually managed to organise ourselves enough to get around to actually attending and had become in many ways the start of our summer, and sometimes the only high spot of it in terms of effective use of our annual leave.

The weather over the years has varied from the dismal and grey, or the most mud-soaked bucketing rain, to the brightest of sunshiny days, but always the incredible flower displays have managed to lift the spirits if not to actually soothe our aching limbs and tortured vertebrae.

I usually take my camera along and now have hundreds of possibly slightly dull pictures of previous years show gardens and floral displays and will admit that once or twice I have wondered whether the show consists of pretty much the same thing every year and how many times I really need to photograph the same bonsai tree displays and the same cacti. Mind you, the show gardens are always unique and very few of them live to see another day once the show ends and all the hard work is dismantled. Occasionally some of them are bought outright, or were designed to be moved to a specific site, but mostly they are just torn apart with many of the plants being sold off to the passing punters.

Each year consists of roughly the same routine, although sometimes on a different day of the week of the show depending upon our own availability. There’s my annual angst over whether there’ll be massive traffic jams and whether we’ve left early enough, only to find ourselves waiting a ridiculous amount of time for the turnstiles to open up, although one year we did accidentally find ourselves inside the site before the gates officially opened which made us feel both strangely guilty and special at the same time.

Then there’s the anxiety over the act of actually parking the car and finding it again. There are picnics to prepare even though we know fully well that we will probably buy sausage sandwiches and ice creams and coffee and fudge as pick-me-ups as we trudge our weary way around the site. Many is the time that I’ve thought that we’re only really there for the food although, because I’m always driving, the temptations of those Pimms tents remain a no-no…

We will tour our old favourites like the displays of giant vegetables, the flower bed competition, the show gardens, and all of the shops in the bizarre marketplace of the “Country Living” pavilion and we might even pop in to see the results of the national flower arranging competition if we remember it’s there and actually track down the relevant pavilion.

Equally, we will visit the various stalls and find pleasant looking plants to buy to embellish our own little patch of the world, and I will gaze longingly at the garden “pods” that already have a spot marked out for them whenever we move into my imaginary and increasingly unlikely “big house”, before I ferret around the various gadget stalls and become terribly impressed by some new gadget or other that I will buy at a “special show price” and then rarely actually use.

This year, however, we never actually got around to booking tickets, and then it turned out that we were going to be away on holiday anyway for most of the dates when the only dates available for our last-minute booking clashed, but we did still have vague plans to call in for a few hours on the way home, or perhaps to attend on the Sunday for a shortened day, all of which had to be cancelled by a slight accident which pretty much incapacitated one of us and certainly made a day’s walking around a huge outdoor site seem an unlikely prospect.

So, for this year, because of various circumstances, one of the cornerstones of our particular annual calendar was missed, but I like to think we’ll get back there next year. After all, it’s become something of a tradition for us now, and it rather felt like we were somehow letting the side down by ending our longish run of attendances.

Strangely enough, when we first started to go there, back in the earliest years of the century, I thought that this was an event that had been going on for decades much like the one in Chelsea, so I was rather surprised when I found out that they only began in 1999 and so we’ve actually been to the majority of all the ones that there have ever been and might even be considered to be “regulars” if anyone ever noticed that we had been there and remembered us, which just goes to prove to me how quickly our little “traditions” can begin.

Crocosmia + Day Lilies = Fire

Anyway, I looked out of my own window the other day noticed the way that this particular combination of blooms, a mixture of crocosmia and day lilies that had burst into life in our own little patch of garden resembled a flame effect, and I realised that I was only aware of such planting effects because of all those years of attending Tatton, even if I can’t make any claims of personal responsibility for this ingenious juxtaposition as it was none of my doing.

Those very day lilies date back to the first year that we ever went on the last day of the show. On that shortened day, much like at other RHS events, once the time gets to 4.00PM, the great sell off begins and if the component parts of the show gardens are being sold off, there is the chance of a bargain to be had. We had spotted some lovely yellow day lilies on one particular show garden and decided that, of all the things on display that day, those were what we most wanted, and so we joined the massed throngs around one particular display and managed to get the very last ones (5 for £10) by the skin of our teeth. I seem to remember that it was a pretty anxious time, and not one we’re in any hurry to repeat, but whenever those particular plants do come into bloom each year they evoke just the slightest memory of a long-lost show garden and the ghost of Tatton’s past.