This morning I drove down to Stock, south of Chelmsford, to collect a gross of honey jars. The Essex Beekeepers organise a county-wide bulk purchase, for orders placed by mid-August, with a two day window in which to go and get them from the central drop-off point, a shed on a turkey farm. It felt slightly strange driving down the farm lane, guided by the odd cryptic notice with a little arrow and Jars hand-written on it. The shed was vast and cavernous, though empty of turkeys, with brown cardboard boxes piled up down both sides, and I could almost pretend I had entered a Guy Ritchie film, apart from the fact that I recognised one of the organisers from the annual conference as a many times honey prize winner, while the other had a round, kindly face and did not look a bit like Vinny Jones. They lifted my boxes into my car for me, saying that they were very heavy, though when I unloaded them at the other end they turned out to weigh less than a full super of honey. Their really hard work had come yesterday, when they had to take delivery of twenty pallets of boxes and break them all down, removing the plastic wrapping, checking for breakages, matching different sizes of jar and lid type to who had ordered what, and writing names on them.
It takes the best part of an hour to drive to Stock from this side of Colchester, and around eight quid's worth of petrol in my car, give or take. It is still worth it. Honey jars from the beekeeping catalogues are phenomenally expensive. Thorne, one of the biggest suppliers, charge £78.73 including delivery for a gross of one pound jars with metal lids, versus the Essex Beekeepers at £35.35 for delivery to central Essex. That's a decent saving, even allowing for the petrol and charging my time at the rate I would earn doing an extra couple of hours in the plant centre instead of driving up and down the A12. (And you can see why, at twenty-five pence per jar ex-delivery, beekeepers get so irritated at the idea of them being limited to single use).
As I arrived I passed the chairman of my local division, just leaving. He was immensely embarrassed that he was collecting jars on behalf of several other people and not me, but I assured him that if I'd wanted someone else to pick them up, I'd have asked around. As it was I'd been planning to combine the trip with a visit to Hyde Hall. I haven't been there for years, and was curious to see what they'd been doing in my absence.
It seemed further away from the A12 than I remembered it from my first visit, and when I finally arrived and looked at my map I saw the reason for that, as the official brown signposted route now takes you down the A130 Southend road virtually to Battlesbridge, before sending you east along another main road, and only then sending you back north to enter the garden from the eastern side. The car park has been relocated so that it is now screened from the garden, and there is a big new entrance with cafe and shop since I last visited. The cafe smelt powerfully of cooking, not in an entirely good way, and I took my latte outside and sat under an umbrella, considering the entrance planting. Rivers of echinacea, grass and gaura, leading to clipped cylinders (or possibly square columns) of Quercus ilex, still rather immature, and thin in some places while whiskery in others. So far, so conventional early twenty-first century design, a sort of sub-Scampston, sub-Tom Stuart-Smith.
I still don't warm to Hyde Hall. I have been there a few times, and never warmed to it, which is probably why I haven't been oftener. Today it took ages to get in, as while all I needed to do was show my membership card, the people ahead of me in the queue weren't members, and both members of staff on the ticket desk were plugging the benefits of membership to them at great length. Behind them two volunteers stood, not obviously doing anything, and I thought one of them could usefully have manned the RHS members desk, which was closed, and operated fast track admissions.
The RHS have made a lot of changes. The Australian and New Zealand garden has been substantially replanted following losses in the three bad winters, and while all neatly mulched with dark stone is still very much a work in progress. Planting in long strips was very much in evidence. That's extremely turn of the century. Think of Chelsea show gardens from a few years back, or the plantings outside expensive City offices.
I was keen to see the dry garden, to garner ideas for my own. It looks very fine, with great clumps of Perovskia, Parahebe, Eryngium, and the usual familiar palette of drought tolerant plants, topped off with a truly lavish quantity of pebbles and shingle, and some nice driftwood sculptures, as well as some less nice metal ones, yours for large amounts of money. It is on a windswept hillside, the converse of good views out across the countryside being the scope for wind damage within a garden. I almost liked it, but something didn't ring true, and my guess it was the soil. If I'd dug down below the pebbles I bet I'd have found Essex clay. There is no way that Perovskia grows to those luxuriant heights in my garden, or the Chatto gravel garden. Hyde Hall is in a low rainfall area, and clay does not necessarily hold much water in summer in a form available for plant growth. It is a bona fide dry garden, but I felt faintly uneasy at the mismatch between the surface image of arid stoniness, and the ground conditions I imagined beneath. If someone from the RHS wants to put me right and say no, those stones and pebbles really do run twenty feet deep and are indicative of the conditions the plants are living in then I apologise now, but I don't think they do.
A hollowed out arena in the side of the hill, that was a building site of raw gabions on my last visit, is now planted up with moisture loving plants like hostas, plus tree ferns. The paths are designed as wooden duck boards, and while you can see evidence of irrigation systems if you look carefully, the overall effect is convincing. I liked that bit, even though I'd missed many of the flowers. The original garden at the top of the hill, dating from when Hyde Hall was a private home and before the RHS, retains its traditional mid twentieth century air, with ponds, clipped yew, roses (flowering much better than mine), a small sunken garden, some nice trees, and some rather well done sub-tropical bedding, including several truly enormous terracotta pots holding tender plants.
It is a popular garden. There were lots of cars in the car park, and many people in the garden, including lots of children. It is doing a good job. I just don't like it. Late August is not the easiest time of the year, but even so. They still haven't solved the original problems of the layout at the core of the garden, merely grafted outer layers on to it, and it has the atmosphere of a garden owned and managed by a corporation. It is correct, tidy, educational, but soulless. Oh well, I was almost passing by anyway.
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