JUDGE NOT? PIFFLE ...

  I have often seen bloggers pontificating about nobody being entitled to judge others.  A lovely ideal, but we do it all the time whether conscious of it or not.  The trick is not to do it hastily or nastily.

  Anyway, it is judging of another kind which has been one of the many things keeping me away from blogging recently.  The Garden Judges Association subsection of the Durban and Coast Horticultural Society does all the organising of the Garden of the Year Competition, and especially for committee members (of which I am one) and Chair (Sr-i-L, who ropes in more senior judge Much Better Half) it is a really busy time.   We inspected and judged some particularly stunning gardens this year, and I must show some pictures of them from time to time.  For this post, I have selected only some of S-i-L’s pics of the actual Garden of the Year.

 

  At the prize-giving on Saturday, we were fortunate to have the appropriately-named Nancy Gardiner to hand out the prizes.  Her photojournalism has graced virtually every gardening magazine in South Africa for many decades, and through magazines and her books she has become well known in most gardening countries of the world,  No less than four plants have been named after her.  She is an active and vivacious 91-year-old, and related with amusement the horror with which some of the residents of a complex she has moved into recently, younger by far than herself, greeted the sight of her digging a large planting hole.   Also her disgust at being offered a wheelchair for a recent flight she undertook!

 

  Isn’t that orchid simply too spectacular to be real?  Really, it is really real, though.

 We also had a brief presentation on the history of DCHS since formation in 1903.  The Exotica shows put it on the world stage of gardening, and it is a pity times have changed to the extent that trying to revive them would be risky in the extreme.   Some really big names have been involved in it over the years – and it was Evah Sew Posh.  Hopefully we have made it a bit less of a Haughty Cultural Society these days!

© November 2012 Colonialist (WordPress/blogs24)

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