The event was well supported by AGS exhibitors and there was a very good show of plants on display; the fact that six Certificates of Merit were awarded underlines the overall quality of the exhibits and there was none better than a Daphne modesta with a large dome of yellow flowers with hardly a gap, which deservedly won Dot Sample her first Farrer Medal.

One group of plants which attracted my attention were the orchids.  David Carver’s three Tongue Orchids, all in immaculate condition and flowering all the way up their many stems were stand-out plants; incredible flower power in such small pots.  David treats these in the same way as his bulb collection, keeping them in clay pots in the sand plunge throughout the year, relatively dry in the summer and watering the plunge in the autumn.  During the growing season he keeps the plunge well soaked without intentionally watering the pots and finds that the plants require a minimum of feed.  They are sited in a well-ventilated greenhouse in a spot that is bright, but receives very little direct sunlight.

Any one of the three could have won an award, but the Serapias lingua ‘Richard Manuel’ with yellow labellum was particularly attractive and won the trophy for the best plant in a 19cm pot.  This, despite the pot size being closer to 13 cm, demonstrating that it is not the size of the pot that counts, but the maturity and quality of the plants.

Someone who takes orchid growing very seriously is Alan Dash, who exhibited seed raised orchids in both the Intermediate and Open Sections.  These included two exceptionally well-flowered pans of Anacamptis laxiflora, one of which won best plant in the Intermediate Section, and a large flowered Serapias neglecta, which impressed everyone who saw it, was honoured with a Certificate of Merit.

Alan uses the sterile environment of a laminar flow cabinet in which to sow his seeds.  He sows them in agar, infused with a fungus obtained from the Hardy Orchid Society, in which they usually germinate quickly.  After four weeks or so he may space them out in another container of similar agar and after a further four to six weeks he moves them into pots filled with loam which has been sieved and riddled to achieve a medium crumb before adding drainage material.  This is primed a week before sowing with agar infused with the fungus.  The fungus in the compost enables the plants to establish quickly with little or no feed, typically flowering in the second year.  This meticulous process enabled Alan to produce these exceptional show plants from a 2022 sowing.

Despite these plants it was Lesley Travis who won the overall Intermediate Aggregate.  I particularly liked her large plant of Lewisiopsis tweedyi which, with a little dead-heading on the morning of the show, would probably have won the show’s best Lewisia trophy.  Instead, this went to Peter Farkasch’s bright orange L. cotyledon hybrid.  Peter described the colour as “bilious”, but some of us found it quite attractive.

There were a number of entries in the Novice Section and it was good to see Lou Nicholls take, what I believe to be, her first aggregate trophy, whilst the best plant in the Novice Section was Selwyn Lane’s Viola altaica.

I am always drawn to Cyclamen and, despite there being no large pan cyclamen class, Ian Robertson found ways to exhibit four large specimens of repandum group cyclamen.  The C. rhodium peloponnesiacum in his 3 pan was particularly impressive with the heavily speckled leaves providing a foil for its flowers.  During the spring, Ian puts these plants under the greenhouse bench to keep them cool.

In the Europe class he showed what is perhaps the largest pan of C. rhodium vividum that I have seen, with bright  pure red flowers.  However, the judges were so impressed with Alan Dash’s spike of Orchis x bergonii (O. anthropomorpha x simia) with leaves still in immaculate condition that the cyclamen was beaten into second place.

In the Open Section there were two small six pan classes (one for seed raised plants) and a four pan class (two flower, two foliage).  These were all  won by Paul and Gill Ranson, which took them a long way to winning the aggregate.  Of these and their other fifteen winning plants, I was attracted to an Iris attica with interesting white and buff flowers which had been grown from society seed.  On closer inspection a number of the flowers had double falls, which intrigued the members of the British Iris Society who had a stand at the show.

Ian Instone was disappointed that his floriferous Draba ‘John Saxton’ was not favoured over Martin Rogerson’s not-yet-flowering Draba mollissima, but the judges did appreciate his Asarum maximum ‘Silver Panda’ which he now gets to flower consistently.  He believes that this has shown significant improvement since switching to a bracken-based compost, but warns that the compost needs to be acidic; much of the bracken compost now available is from alkaline areas and is not suitable for this plant.

For those that like small flowers, Carol Kellett’s three pan shrub entry contained two bare-looking specimens of Melicytus.  It took a hand lens, duly supplied with the exhibit, to reveal that they were actually quite well-flowered, as Jon Evans’ excellent close-up photograph of her Melicytus alpinus shows.  Unfortunately, the judges were not sufficiently impressed.

The highlight of the show for anyone who admires the unusual was George Elder’s South African Wurmbea recurva with deep purple flowers and contrasting yellow anthers.  This was beautifully presented and duly awarded a Certificate of Merit.  George also won a Certificate of Merit for his highly floriferous Ornithogalum bungei.

John Dixon exhibited two Veronicas in contrasting shades of blue.  His Certificate of Merit winning V. bolkardaghensis was neat and well-flowered and perhaps more impressive than Peter Hood’s Certificate of Merit winner of the same species the previous week.

Brenda Nickell’s dainty Bergenia ‘Dragonfly Flirt’ was new to most of us and was also awarded a Certificate of Merit, and no show report would be complete without a mention of Don Peace, whose Androsace villosa var. taurica was similarly honoured for simply being a plant of outstanding quality.

Reporter: Bob Worsley
Photographer: Jon Evans