I'm hoping that the Moderators will allow me a bit of poetic licence here as this is not exactly related to the Umbria trip.
One of the gardens we visited on the trip was Torrecchia Vecchia which had been originally designed by Dan Peason. Among the old photos that I had recently found was one that I took in 1996 and was associated with his Gold Medal winning entry at Chelsea that year. He had asked for assistance from the students and staff as Capel Manor Horticultural College in Enfield with the preparation of special domes for his rooftop garden entry. He had glass dome skylights and wanted to use green domes to mirror them. He produced 6 of what I can only describe as giant hanging baskets, 1 metre diameter and 0.5 m in height, along with several thousand plugs of assorted herbs. Our solution was to line them with green netting and put in a narrow layer of potting soil. Obviously this needed to be kept in place without adding too much to the weight, so we filled a large number of sacks with all the crushed up expanded polystyrene we could lay our hands on. We then cut out squares of plywood large enough to cover the base of each dome, drilled holes in them and wired them down tight to the domes. After flipping them over we now had 6 green domes, but not the sort of green that was required. We now had to plant each of them up with a different herb by cutting the netting and planting through it. Then came the task of not only ensuring that the plants survived but that they filled out enough to look like one very large plant. They were placed in a poly tunnel to protect them from the elements and monitored several times a day, every day, to make sure that they did not dry out. Any plants that died were replaced, any obvious gaps were filled with new plants and the months and weeks to deadline day were nervously ticked off. In the end he chose 4 of the domes to use in the garden, Thymus 'Silver Posie', Thymus 'Bertram Anderson', Helichrysum italicum and Santolina chamaecyparissus. For our efforts a number of us were selected to 'stand' on the garden during the Show, handing out information and answering questions from members of the public. I did that for two of the days and as icing on the cake was paid 40 pounds for my 'trouble'!
