The guest speaker for September's meeting of the Elstead Garden Club was Mrs Fiona Lawrenson, a  garden designer. One of her local works is The Normandy Community Therapy Garden which aims to help people who have a long term or limiting disability. It also gives them a chance to achieve a recognised horticultural qualification.  Volunteers who can give a few hours a month are always needed.

Fiona started her garden design business 15 years ago with a grant from the Princes Trust, and The Enterprise Council. The business has expanded and she mostly deals with clients who have gardens over an acre in size. A holder of three gold awards from Chelsea and three international awards, she has established herself as an enthusiastic designer with attention to detail.

One of the international competitions involved a visit to Japan where they were given a site fifteen metres square (fifty  feet square) to create an English Garden in seventeen days. The team were hampered by not speaking Japanese and the Japanese helpers did not speak English. Much can be done however with gestures and hand signals, and a spectacular garden was created with water cascading over a wall into a pond and planted up with English flowers.

We were then treated to a slide show of some of the gardens that she had created over the years and their different seasons with trees playing an important part in the landscape. Plants are chosen for their leaves as well as their blooms as flowers will die but an added bonus with some flowers is the attractive seed heads. She had commented that she liked a plant that dies well. this remark had been taken up by the satirical magazine 'Private Eye' and had won her sixth place in the Private Eye list of quotes; she had come ahead of Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame! The basic secret to creating beautiful gardens is in the amount of compost that you dig in, we were told; but in the end gardens are only as good as the people who look after them, but her gardens had considerable staying power as the slides taken some years after their creation showed.

After a few notices members were reminded that the Club's next evening meeting will be on October 10^th at 7.45 pm in the URC hall when the speaker will be Mr. C. Howkins who will talk on 'Local Trees, Fact and Fiction'. Everyone is welcome to what promises to be an entertaining evening.

Diana and Richard Terry