So was Muswell Hill Horticultural Society for their show a fortnight later on September 20.
In between, Hampstead Garden Suburb Horticultural Society, and particularly their visitors, Grimsdyke Brass, had to deal with wind and rain.
Susan Bennett from Muswell Hill with her well deserved RHS award and cup.(Image: Ruth Pavey)
But still, the band played on outside the Free Church Hall, in Northway, adding cheer and encouragement to a busy and successful show.
All these events had one thing in common, the wonderful way a drought-challenged season has nevertheless yielded exceptional produce.
There were great flowers, vegetables and fruit everywhere.
Gary Sycamore’s award-winning veg basket.(Image: Ruth Pavey)
The Highgate show was in the Holly Lodge Community Centre, on the sloping land that was once Angela Burdett-Coutts’s orchard.
Roxane Stirling and her fellow organisers found it harder to fit everything into the smaller space than their usual URC chapel, but for visitors on a sunny afternoon, it was a delight to have tea out on the terrace.
Angela Burdett-Coutts was an heiress with a great wish to do good, although her ambitious schemes met with only mixed success. I mentally raised a cup of tea to her, knowing that it was not her wish to see her orchards dug up for development.
Muswell Hill Horticultural Society regularly has the spacious North Bank in Pages Lane, for its shows, where exhibits always look good and stalls for plants, honey and crafts are set up outside.
Gary Sycamore was, as usual, a mainstay, winning multiple prizes, not least a first for his vibrant, painterly basket of produce and another for an eye-catching vase of zinnias.
Zinnias tend to be in the pink, red or purple range but these, named ‘Envy’, are greenish yellow and cream.
Juliet Mann grew her very dark, prize tomatoes from seed she had collected, but had forgotten the name.
“Russian?”, I asked …. “If you say so”…. Well tentatively, I do say so, although googling Black Russian tomato comes up with pictures of fruit rather less black than Juliet’s.
We had no doubt about her Comice, jewel among pears, a plate of which also won 1st prize.
Jenny Kruss showed a lovely vase of white dahlias, grouped close together to accentuate their varied shapes. She says the mauve tinted one is called Crazy Love, the cactus form is My Love and the decorative form was given her by Susan Bennett years ago but neither of them knows its name.
Susan Bennett, of the celebrated garden in St Regis Place, Muswell Hill, and doyenne of the National Garden Scheme (NGS) was honoured at the prizegiving.
She received a well-deserved Recognition Award from the Royal Horticultural Society for her “outstanding contribution in encouraging gardening in the community and charitable fundraising”.
No-one raises more money locally for the NGS than Susan and her husband, Earl Hyde, or puts more into welcoming diverse groups of people to their garden – an honour on a grander scale would not be out of place.
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