Euphorbia mellifera

June sees us travelling to Madeira and the Azores as Razvan Chisu talks to us about plant hunting in this region. Born in Transylvania Razvan grew up in a Botanical Garden there and now lives in the UK. Several of our garden plants originated  in the Madeira/Azores region thanks to plant hunters who have collected seed or cuttings and propagated from those.

Razvan’s talk starts at 7.45pm on Thursday 13th June at the Christchurch Centre, cost is £1.50 payable at the door with tea/coffee afterwards.

Before that however, on June 5th, we have the first of our Bus Trips. Nowhere near as exotic as Madeira but promising to be a fascinating day out nonetheless, we will be going to the British Ironwork Centre and Sculpture Park in the morning and Wollerton Old Hall Gardens in the afternoon. See our Events page for further details.

June is also the month for Eccleshall Open Gardens. This year it is being held on the weekend June 15-16th. Buy your programme outside Eccleshall Library on the day and spend the weekend wandering around Eccleshall and many of its gardens – and eating homemade cakes.

If you enjoy growing herbs (and eating cake!) then Hooksgreen Herbs have a Nursery Open Days on June 22nd and 23rd. You can find them at Hooksgreen Farm, Old Road, Oulton Heath.

Our Annual Plant Sale takes place on Saturday May 4th and is held at St Michael’s Hall in Lichfield St. ST15 8BB. The sale starts at 9am and will close at 1pm – admission is FREE. A wide range of plants will be on sale from vegetables, bedding plants, basket and border annuals, hardy perennials; sweet peas to garden peas, begonias to beans, coreopsis to cabbage (well, you get the idea by now). Our members will be donating their surplus cuttings and young plants so the actual mix will depend very much on what has done well over the last few months.  Further details are on our Events page.

The following Thursday – May 9th – is our normal evening meeting at Christ Church Centre in Stone at 7.45pm. Our speaker tonight is Dr Keith I Ferguson who will be talking about the North American plants growing in British gardens. Dr Ferguson worked in the USA for a number of years before moving to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew where he worked for 29 years. It promises to be an interesting and possibly surprising evening.

Byron Machin, a geography teacher from the Staffordshire Moorlands, has a passion for all aspects of landscape history. He has been researching our native British orchids, particularly those of the Peak District for a number of years and on Thursday April 11th, will be sharing that research with us.

Our Plant Sale is next month – May 4th. If you are likely to have any surplus plants you can donate please let Helen know.

Richard and Jill Rawlings, owners of Mynd Hardy Plants, will be talking about the History of Walled Gardens at our March meeting on Thursday 14th.

Mynd Hardy Plants is a plant nursery within the Victorian walled garden of Delbury Hall at Diddlebury, Shropshire. Well worth a visit, they also open for the NGS (as shown above), and featured on BBC Gardeners’ World in April 2015.

National Hellebore Collection Holder Mike Byford will be bringing plants for sale from Hazles Cross Farm Nursery, Kingsley to accompany this seasonal talk on February 14th. Of his passion for Hellebores Mike says –

“I have had a passion for hellebores for over 30 years since discovering them in the gloomy depths of winter illuminating an otherwise drab winter garden in a large stately home. From there I investigated the work of Elizabeth Strangman, Helen Ballard and Will McLewin in studying the wild species and developing further the range of garden hybrids first developed by the early Victorians in Germany and the UK.”

Happy New Year!

Our January meeting is on Thursday 10th, and as it is our AGM meeting it starts a little earlier at 7.30. As we have a lot to get through there will be no plant sales table this month, so please save any spares for February.

Our speaker this month will be David Emley from Staffordshire WIldlife Trust talking about 42 years of watching wildlife. Our advertised speaker – Andrew Dobraszczyc – is unfortunately unable to come this month; we look forward to welcoming him another time.

Wishing all our members – and readers – a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We look forward to seeing you at our meetings, Plant Sale and/or Show next year.