Tuesday 20 - Saturday 24 May 2014
Come and see us this year at the Chelsea Flower Show. Buy tickets for Chelsea Flower Show 2014
To mark the 101st RHS Chelsea Flower Show Burncoose Nurseries will be featuring 101 plants from China on its exhibit in the Great Marquee. (Detailed plant list available from the stand.)
The British gardening public remains largely unaware that so many of the most popular everyday plants in our herbaceous, ornamental and woodland gardens were in fact first discovered only 100 or so years ago in Southern China and its historical outlying provinces.
The 101 plants which you will see on our stand at Chelsea represent the work of the great plant hunters, Ernest Wilson, George Forrest and Frank Kingdom Ward who travelled to China after 1905 on often dangerous and difficult expeditions to collect seed from new and unknown species of plants. These funded expeditions were by nurserymen, horticulturalists and landowners who remained safely back in the UK. British gardens and Western horticulture in general are greatly in their debt.
To explain what these intrepid plant hunters actually experienced in China the Burncoose stand will present on screen a long series of original photographs taken on several of George Forrest’s 11 separate expeditions to China between 1905 and 1932.
These photographs come from the Williams family archive on the Caerhays Estate (of which Burncoose Nurseries is part) and were sent back to Cornwall by Forrest to J.C. Williams of Caerhays Castle, the great grandfather of the current owner, Charles Williams.
These pictures of life in China at the turn of the 20th Century and the plants which the collectors discovered in different habitats are unique and have never been seen by the public before.
This is a rather different Burncoose stand which will not necessarily be the usual massed blaze of colour. The intention is to enable visitors to the show to conjure up in their minds the historical reality of how this vast wealth of Chinese plants have actually come to thrive and be enjoyed in our gardens today.
The stand will try to represent a rocky Chinese ravine with the plants which the great British plant hunters would have seen for the very first time. It has been created and brought to life by Burncoose’s long-standing Chelsea design team Gerry Hammond and Louisa Lazarowicz.
Burncoose Nurseries are again most grateful to Guy Hands and Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd,
2 More London Riverside, London SE1 2AP who have sponsored this exhibit.
Last year we were delighted to be awarded a Silver Gilt Medal.
