RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2007 - It's the Good Life at RHS Hampton Court

One of the big topics at Hampton Court this year is "Growing your own" with several of the gardens featuring a veg patch and a dedicated marquee for showing delicious home grown produce.

The Torres Tapas (SilverFlora) Garden (pictured below) by Anthea Guthrie is a vegetable patch with Mediterranean vegetables suitable for authentic tapas dishes. One of the lovely features of this garden is vine and Olive Trees with Tapas inspired vegetables to show how simple traditional ingredients can be grown in the smallest of back yards.

Mange Tout (Silver-Gilt) designed by Francesca Cleary and Ian Lawrence proves that it is possible for an average sized plot to be decorative, yet practical, almost everything can be eaten, including the flowers! The Sandolin Garden of Regeneration (Silver-Gilt) (pictured below) designed by Philippa Pearson, focuses on the environment and all things organic. Exhibiting for the first time at Hampton Court, Philippa has designed the garden to show how eco-friendly gardens can be as aesthetic as they are ethical. The garden is edged with wooden posts and trained fruits within which you find crammed all manner of lovely vegetables and fruits.

There is a market garden in The Daily Mail Marquee, reproducing a small holding with the values of the 1950s – Village Post Office, Garage and Market Garden, (Gold) designed by Audrey Daw, Mary Payne and Jon Wheatley. The Then & Now Garden, designed by Elizabeth Stoner, (Silver) is really two gardens in one, contrasting the design of the typical late 1940s garden with how the same garden would look today.

Chris Beardshaw’s The Growing Schools Garden (Gold) is a multi-sensory garden with both flowers, fruit and vegetables and there is even a vegetable patch on the lovely The Miller’s Garden (Silver). Alton Infant School’s garden, Learning to Look After our World (Gold) also shows us how it should be done, and all give plenty of creative ideas of how we can turn even the smallest back garden or clear patch, into a lovely area for growing food and having fun.

Growing your Own is now hugely popular with statistics from the Horticultural Trade Association showing expenditure on edible plants and seeds at an estimated £76.8m in the 12 months leading up to October 2006. The RHS and BBC TV series ‘Grow Your Own Veg’ attracted around 3 million viewers, so it is plain to see that the Grow your Own bug is spreading.