For a festival about an activity as hands-on as gardening, this year’s Fringe has a surprisingly strong showing of intangible, virtual events that are being held entirely in the ether.  Meaning there’s no need to get dirt under your fingernails or endure the time-honoured gardeners’ maladies of back/knee/hip (delete as appropriate) ache in the process [...]

The post The festival sans frontières continues appeared first on Chelsea Fringe.

With the memory of last summer’s wash-out still all too clearly etched (or should that be water-marked?) on many veg growers’ memories, the good people at Battersea Flower Station garden centre have come up with a cunning wheeze to guarantee a harvest this year.  Namely, why not knit your own veg instead?

On Sundays during the festival Battersea Flower Station co-founder Lisa will be running a ‘veg-knit-a-long’ where participants will be shown how to create their own knitted potager.  The hour-long workshops will be run twice on the second two Sundays of the Fringe, 11-12am and 2-3pm, with needles, yarn and a pattern/instructions to knit peas in a pod.  Acrylic yarn will be used as this is cheap to experiment with and it offers a particularly vibrant range of colours.

Lisa, together with knitting whizz Fran (a keen gardener and allotmenteer who brings some serious veg know-how to his knitting) will be on hand to help with basic knitting techniques for those who need it.   A self-confessed novice knitter, Lisa is quick to offer reassurance to fellow newbies, “Absolute beginners can turn up before the workshops for a quick lesson in casting on and the 2 basic knit stitches. If people want to bring along their own needles or favourite wool, then that’s fine too.”  Even left-handers (the awkward squad of handicrafting – and as one myself, I know whereof I speak) will be catered for and Lisa recommends trying the continental method of knitting first before you try to learn what’s known as left-handed knitting. She refers lefties to this helpful YouTube link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuRLFl36tDY).

For those who really want to make their knitted veg patch completely authentic, there will be the option to branch out into fauna as well as flora.  Lisa and Fran have knitted a slug (perfect for sticking pins into when your real lettuce have been decimated by marauding slimesters) and say they can certainly help others to recreate something similar.  Lisa reports that Fran has made all kinds of things that he’ll bring along as inspiration – “caterpillars, slugs, beetroot, peas in a pod, even a butternut squash.  We have a selection of things people can try to make and the idea is that you take your efforts away with you to finish at home.”

Leaving aside dodgy weather and the usual battles with pests and diseases, real veg can take a long time to get going – leeks for example have a long growing season of around 80 days.  With a bit of practice, knitted veg can come to fruition much more quickly.  Lisa and Fran estimate that, depending on the knitter’s speed and skill level, a simple parsnip might take between 2-5 hours to make, with 20-30 hours for an artichoke, and a leek “somewhere in the middle.”

The Battersea Flower Station knitters are planning on featuring completed veg on their Facebook page in the weeks following the workshops, to show how people are getting along with their creations.  So if the Great British Summertime doesn’t deliver a bumper crop this year, at least it looks like the Chelsea Fringe will!

www.batterseaflowerstation.co.uk

A pop-up meadow planted in the heart of corporate London as part of the Chelsea Fringe is proving just the ticket for stressed out City workers.  Created by Kathleen Towler and Catherine Tollington of Millefleurs Organic Gardeners, the soul-soothing garden contains wildflowers and edible herbs, and is strategically sited in busy Exchange Square, Broadgate so that it catches the attention of office workers dashing to and from work.

The duo – who are specialists in organic container and small space gardening – share a philosophy of “beautiful gardens refresh the human spirit”.  With this in mind they are inviting people to down keyboards, phones and all the other paraphernalia of office life and enjoy some restorative ‘Lateral Tinkering’ in the meadow at 12 noon each day.   Catherine says, “At Millefleurs, we believe there’s a big upside to people taking a few minutes downtime each day in a beautiful workplace garden.   It makes you happier.  Creating a tailor-made green space, where staff can relax, can improve health and wellbeing, build relationships across departments, improve creative thinking and boost motivation.”

Despite the cold weather Kathleen and Catherine report that their meadow is turning heads and attracting a positive response from the public, drawing approving comments such as “gardening is great for bonding” and “an office garden is great, otherwise its all about spreadsheets”.   Their horticultural advice service has also been in demand,  with interested passers-by asking about soil types, wildflowers, container gardening, plant varieties and how to take care of them.

The plants in this ‘Fringe meadow’ have been chosen for their seasonality as well as their connection to the locale and include fragrant plants such as sweet cicely, chives and ‘wild’ versions of familiar herbs, such as wild or corn mint, wild rocket and wild garlic.  Some of the plants have been grown in London at least since Roman times and Kathleen points out that wild fennel and chives were both used to make Tisana, a traditional Roman pottage.

On Friday 24^th May the chef at Piccolino, Exchange Square will be gathering ingredients grown in the meadow to create an altogether more modern menu, featuring tempting dishes such as chilled spring soup, marinated lamb cutlets (with the marinade to include wild garlic and sweet cicely), wild herb salad and Panna cotta infused with lemon balm.   It sounds delicious – Londinium eat your heart out.

Lateral Tinkering with Millefleurs Organic Gardeners runs until 7 June.

www.millefleurs.co

It’s all very well kitting your office out with the latest technology, supersonic broadband and a state of the art coffee machine, but what about a garden?  Wouldn’t that be nice?  And isn’t the Chelsea Fringe the perfect excuse to install one?

It’s a thought that has clearly occurred to those who work at ‘Oldfield Partners’, whose premises – 130 Buckingham Palace Road – have acquired a pop-up Office Garden for the duration of the Fringe.  The brainchild of Amicia De Moubray, who is a co-ordinator of the Kent satellite Chelsea Fringe and whose husband works at the firm, the inside out garden was designed and installed by Lucy Adams, head gardener at Doddington Place Gardens in Kent.  “We thought it be fun to jazz up the office and be an entertaining sight for people walking from Victoria Station to Chelsea flower show”, says Amicia and, rather like a Chelsea show garden, the garden has been designed to be looked at rather than entered.

The ‘office’ has been attracting a bit of attention since installation – both from passers-by and those arriving at the company for meetings.  Those who work on the ground floor say ‘it’s like being inside a TV show’, with people showing their appreciation by giving thumbs up signs and taking lots of photos.  The pistachio green colour scheme stands out brilliantly against the red brick backdrop of the offices and its witty take on office life seems to appeal to all ages both young and old.  Most of the furniture has been sourced from Doddington Place although the table was made especially for the installation and the computers came from Cherry Computers, in Faversham.   The plants selected by Lucy are all low maintenance so perfect for the busy office worker who doesn’t have much time to lavish on plant care but who appreciates a bit of colour and greenery nonetheless.

After its three weeks’ sojourn on busy Buckingham Palace Road, the Office Garden will be packing up its computer terminal, closing down its filing cabinet and relocating to Doddington Place Gardens  (http://www.doddingtonplacegardens.co.uk/), where it will continue to be enjoyed, albeit in rather less urban surroundings.

Move over Kylie, there’s another song we can’t get out of our heads… judging from comments on Twitter it looks like Jo and Dan’s ‘compost song’ has acquired full-blown earworm status since its recent airing on the Chelsea Fringe edition of Gardeners’ Question Time.

And with the refrain of John Innes, John Innes, who is he, who is he? still reverberating in our ears, now might be the moment to remind you that Jo Stephenson and Dan Woods -the musical comedy duo behind the song and real life allotmenteers across the north-south London divide – aren’t quite done with the Fringe yet.  On 8 June, the final weekend of the Fringe, they will be presenting Can You Dig It?,  a hilarious show about the complex world of allotments, the delights and occasional disappointments of growing your own, and the irresistible charms of Alan Titchmarsh.  The show appeals to gardeners and non-gardeners alike – just as long as you don’t laugh AT the carrots, laugh WITH the carrots…

Can You Dig It?  at Oxford House

8^th June 19.30

Tickets £10. http://www.wegottickets.com/event/221711

Suitable for all ages

For a festival about an activity as hands-on as gardening, this year’s Fringe has a surprisingly strong showing of intangible, virtual events that are being held entirely in the ether.  Meaning there’s no need to get dirt under your fingernails or endure the time-honoured gardeners’ maladies of back/knee/hip (delete as appropriate) ache in the process of taking part.

And for events like the National Trust’s Dawn Chorus event you don’t even need to be in possession of a garden, just a decent alarm clock.  This virtual happening will take place in the Twittersphere in the early hours of 9th June, the final day of the Fringe, and extends an invitation to people all over the UK to tweet their observations of the dawn chorus.  It’s being orchestrated by a posse of 7 artists stationed at National Trust properties across London, who will be getting up with the lark to add their own observations (in 140 characters or less) to a dawn chorus the like of which no terrestrial twitcher will ever have witnessed before. Join in by tweeting to and following @NTlovesLondon, or follow it by using #dawnchorus.

In the meantime, poet Sarah Salway continues her virtual peregrination around the fringe – to date she has visited some 16 Fringe sites and posted words and pictures poetic about each one of them on her website www.writerinthegarden.com.  With 4 days of Fringe still to go, there’s plenty more scope for the Muse to strike – and that means for you just as much as for Sarah, who provides helpful prompts should you want to keep her company in the creative stakes.  Stay up to date with Sarah’s progress by following @sarahsalway on Twitter.

For Michelle Chapman (aka the blogger Veg Plotting, http://vegplotting.blogspot.co.uk/), it was an earthbound Fringe event that provided the inspiration behind her event, Chelsea Fringe…the Bloggers Cut. Unable to attend the Cake Sunday celebrations orchestrated by the Blackstock Triangle Gardeners on 2 June or indeed any of the Fringe events being held in her more local Fringe satellite of Bristol, Michelle decided to create her own cake, gardening and blogging Fringe event on the web, having realised that “there’s truly no physical boundary to the Fringe”.

Part of the thinking behind the Bloggers Cut – in which bloggers are invited to share their garden-related cake experiences on 2 June was wanting to show anyone can take part in the Chelsea Fringe no matter where they’re located.   Michelle liked the idea of bringing people together who are hundreds of miles apart with a common aim of celebrating all aspects of gardening, friendship… and cake.

The Veg Plotting blog forms the central hub for the event with links to all participants for a world-wide virtual garden and cake tour across the web.

Michelle is thoroughly enjoying the Bloggers’ Cut contributions received to date, and she reports that the ‘area’ covered by the event is “approx 400 miles north to south and over 200 miles east to west so far!” She putting together a map of the event, which can be found on 
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=201977637091139830005.0004de2bc88ce96bbc9ab&msa=0&ll=52.295042,-1.977539&spn=7.837467,20.236816

The Fringe blog post deadline is June 9^th – so there’s still time to contribute, consume cake and be part of this innovative Fringe event!http://vegplotting.blogspot.com

Watch an interview with Festival’s director Tim Richardson on the three weeks event based on the relationship between gardening, art, the city and its inhabitants.

The Chelsea Fringe 2014 will run across three weeks in London and far beyond from May 17 until June 8. The Chelsea Fringe is an open-access festival which is a celebration of everything to do with gardens, plants, landscape and the environment. After a great response in 2012 (100+ events) and 2013 (250+ events), we are hoping to build on that success in 2014. Please email info@chelseafringe.com for more details or to register interest.

The Chelsea Fringe is a true open-access fringe festival: there are no entry criteria beyond the basic requirements that the project be on-topic, interesting and legal (with the emphasis on the ‘interesting’). The Fringe has no adjudication panels, medals or judging, and is unsponsored and unfunded. Once an idea has been accepted in principle, project organisers will be able to register online from mid January.

If you want to get involved with the Chelsea Fringe as a volunteer, please emailalex@chelseafringe.com. Nearly everything is achieved by a dedicated team who are now divided into regional groups across London and beyond.

An interview with Tim Richardson (in German)

“It’s time to get involved again with the Chelsea Fringe”

Are you planning to register your project for the Chelsea Fringe 2014? The early bird catches the worm! Register before 31 March and pay 10% less.

The reduced rates are as follows:

Standard rate: £135
Charities: £90
Local authorities: £90
Individual self funded artists and designers: £22.50
Voluntary-run community organisations/gardens: £22.50
Online only projects: £18
One day, one person event: £9

Before you register your project, you’ll need to obtain the password from your project co-ordinator.

If you’re interested in taking part in the Fringe but aren’t ready to register your project yet, email info@chelseafringe.com to find out more.

Daniel Bell designs and looks after lots of living walls, including the fab one at the Athenaeum Hotel where he’ll be showing you how to make one on 20 May. We asked Daniel to tell us a bit about himself.

What turned you on to Green Walls?
A friend owned a gastro pub in Kings Cross and he wanted to do something different with it using plants. He saw a picture of a living wall in Paris and suggested I should give it a go. After a few meetings with Patrick Blanc I built my first living wall. You can see it at The Driver in Wharfdale Road.

What are your favourite plants for a shady/sunny wall?
For shade I’d say Fatsia japonica, Fuchsia (light shade) and the green fern Cyrtomium fortunei. For sun, Solanum jasminoides, Yucca filamentosa and Iris confusa.

Do you have a green wall at home?
Yes, I have one indoors in the dining room and three outdoors North, East and West facing. I am researching growing plants hydroponically in a cold climate  – I live in Sweden – with interesting results.

How green are green walls?
Very, my green walls consist of nearly all recycled materials and the felt which I use as a replacement for soil (made from recycled clothing) acts as a sponge, collecting harmful particles produced by city traffic and breaking them down. The walls are a haven for insects and small birds.

Do you have to have a head for heights to look after the Athenaeum’s green wall?
Yes and I’m afraid I still don’t. The wall is 22m high and I stand on a cherry picker. Providing I stay focused on the plants and nothing else I just about get by!

Are you an actor, storyteller or musician? The Chelsea Fringe Festival 2014 would love to hear from you. We’re looking for performance artists to apply to take part in Fringe events at outdoor and indoor venues for 2014. We’d love to hear from actors, storytellers and musicians who have performance ideas related to gardening, plants, flowers and growing.

Previous Fringe performances have included the musical comedy duo Can You Dig It? (above), who performed at the Chelsea Fringe edition of Gardeners’ Question Time in Hackney Town Hall, and an allotment-themed play at a street party in Finsbury Park (below).

Please contact us with information about your proposed performance including video clips/links by emailing info@chelseafringe.com.

NB: We can not offer payment for performers or expenses but some of our venues may cover expenses or artists’ fees for suitable submissions.

Oxalis corniculata

Paul Debois is a garden photographer who has photographed many Chelsea Fringe events. This year, he’s putting on a Fringe event himself. We caught up with him.

You’ve photographed quite a few Fringe events – what attracted you to it?
Most Fringe events have an underlying sense of humour. There’s often a serious message, but I really connect with the fun element. It’s a side of gardening too often overlooked.

What have been some of your favourite events?
From 2013, I loved the WC Garden. It had some serious planting, in a bizarre location. From 2012, it had to be the Heavy Plant Crossing. Seeing tourists approached by the artist, Julia Barton was a spectacle. They thought she was barmy, but everyone she spoke to entered into the spirit, and joined in. This to me summed up what the Chelsea Fringe is about. I also had a soft spot for the Garden of Disorientation – and the associated Mojito Bar!

You’re a professional garden photographer and have your own event in the Fringe this year. Tell us more about the project.
The ‘Where the Wild Things Grow‘ Fringe event evolved from a series of photographs I had been taking of plants growing wild in urban spaces. As any gardener knows, plants choose their own favourite places to grow, despite our best efforts to thwart them. I’m fascinated by the random places where they appear in urban spaces, and I started recording what I found about four years ago. Lynn Keddie also started making paintings derived from my photographs, and Alys Fowler provided some commentary in the form of an essay. With these elements, an exhibition entitled ‘Wildlings’ was born, forming part of ‘Where the Wild Things Grow’. Photo walks and wild flower talks, with a photo competition for children are also part of the event. There is also a pop up cafe, which will serve a splendid sit down dinner on the evening of 24th May. Details of booking this meal will be on the website soon.

What are your tips for photographing gardens/plants?
Don’t be afraid to get your knees dirty! Plants are so often very small. Get down and join them, don’t just stand above and hope for the best.  Also, shoot into the light, despite the advice of all old camera manuals. Plants, particularly foliage, come to life with back-light. Leaves turn into beautiful translucent graphic shapes. Front light makes them heavy and ‘solid’. Few people remember gardens this way. Wait for evening or morning light, too. It is more sympathetic and less contrasty.

What’s your advice for anyone wanting to become a professional photographer?
Learn how to tell a story. Don’t rely on special techniques as these have a short shelf life.

www.pauldebois.com

Jennifer Sarginson, Gardener in Charge at Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, will be planting up a meadow and a green roof on 17 May as part of the Chelsea Fringe. We asked her for some tips on making a wildflower meadow.

What kind of plants work best in a wildflower meadow?
It depends on the site and what kind of maintenance you will be doing. A meadow composed completely of annuals will be very colourful but there’ll be bare ground in winter and there’s a good chance it will need to be re-sown from scratch each year. When planting into a lawn as we did, choose moderately vigorous perennials like ragged robin, bladder campion and knapweed which will spread over time. We planted them as well-rooted plug plants.

Is the method the same if it’s on a roof? There’s far less soil on a roof so you need to choose drought tolerant plants. We needed the roof to be low maintenance so we used tough plants such as goat’s beard and wavy hair grass.

What’s the trickiest bit?
Getting the plants to establish well. We had to plant about 3000 plugs to cover our 100sq m roof. Then you’ve got make sure they’re kept moist enough to let their root systems develop. We’ve also been having problems with birds pulling up the plugs!

Will it look colourful all summer?
We should have plants flowering throughout the late spring, summer and early autumn. But as they’re perennials we’ll have to wait until next year to really see the benefits of all our hard work.

 Why did you decide to plant one at Strawberry Hill?
The boundaries of the garden here at Strawberry Hill are quite different now to how they would have been during the 18th century when the house was owned by Horace Walpole. Then the garden ran down to the Thames where there would have been waterside meadows. Our new meadow will visitors a flavour of what it would have looked like. It will also be a great teaching resource for the many school and outreach groups we welcome to the garden on a regular basis.

Don’t miss Making Meadows at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, TW1 4ST, 17 May. 

Harriot Lane Fox is  part of the team that answers emails to the Chelsea Fringe inbox – she gives friendly advice on taking part in the Fringe. She tells us more about what putting a project involves.

What kind of projects is the Fringe looking for?
The Chelsea Fringe manifesto, if that doesn’t sound too up-the-revolution, is fantastically inclusive. We celebrate anything to do with gardens and gardening as long as it’s legal. The basic ingredient is plants but that could be growing them – in allotments, on round-abouts, behind private front doors, up posh hotel walls; turning them into art or high fashion, serenading them, writing odes, telling stories, putting them on the menu and even into cocktail shakers. In fact, it’s probably easier to say what we’re not looking for (that would be burger vans; thanks for getting in touch but we’re not that kind of festival!).

What makes a good Fringe project?
The best ones really engage their audiences, non-gardeners as well as the green-fingered. For instance, this year we have a new medicinal garden where you can learn how to make potions as well as ooh-ah at the planting, a celebration of sci-fi author John Wyndham with a triffid-making workshop, and a mobile ice-cream making machine using community-grown plants to create crazy flavours. I know that if I get a tingle from the first email enquiry, so will our visitors when they read the listing.

The other ingredient is more practical. While we can help projects discover their inner Fringe-y-ness, in the end they have to be well organised and self-propelled.

What happens once my project is approved?
We don’t have paid staff (or an office). Instead the Fringe operates a kind of buddy system. Once we think your project is suitable, we ask the appropriate regional team to appoint a volunteer co-ordinator to help you sign up. Registration gives projects access to tips on marketing and using social media, and our PR person, Rosie, will include you in her Fringe publicity campaign, bolstering your own. We also have a big public meeting on May 14, where you can meet fellow Fringers (Fringies? Fringe-istas?) and collect the branding board to help visitors find you.

Is it possible to set up a project outside London?
Absolutely. The Chelsea Fringe Festival has gone viral. We generally say you need five or six events in one place to qualify as a satellite fringe, and this year we’ve added Ljubljana and Brighton to Bristol, Kent and Vienna. There are lone events too, in Norwich and Portland. And other projects only exist online (one uploaded in New York).

Is there any funding or sponsorship available?
Not unless you raise it yourself. To say we operate on a shoestring is to flatter the Fringe bank balance. That’s why we have so many different registration rates, to enable lone artists and garden designers, underfunded community groups and primary schools, and every size of charity to take part. This is a grass-roots festival.

Interested in taking part? Email info@chelseafringe.com