OVERWHELMED
When I got the call to say I’d won the challenge I was
absolutely over the moon. There’s been so much to take in I
don’t think my feet have touched the ground since.
My first job as winner was to go down to meet
Sarah Eberle and the Bradstone team at the head office in Hulland
Ward. I was nervous beforehand – Sarah is practically RHS
royalty after all – but I was relieved to find that she’s really
down to earth.
It was great to meet everyone, but there’s
just so much to get my head around. There’s already a lot for
me to do with forms to fill in and timetables to arrange and
although the show’s not until June, it suddenly doesn’t seem that
far away at all.
I won a similar competition last year to
design a garden at the Tatton Park Flower Show for the Anthony
Nolan Trust, but this is just on a different scale. There we
were constantly struggling to make the design fit in with a very
tight budget as it was for a charity, but this time we’ll have a
professional team to help us and I’m really looking forward to
having a bit more creative freedom.
Sarah’s had such a lot of success with show
gardens and I think we share a similar passion for their
theatricality and the amazing potential they have to tell a
story. I just feel so lucky to have her on hand to help me
develop my own ideas and I’m looking forward to learning all I can
from the experience.