Victoriana Nursery Gardens

I have worked with the lovely chaps at Victoriana Nursery Gardens for nearly 5 years now, I was first approached by Stephen when we lived at our first house and where in the process of trying to make our garden productive after years of inactivity, he proposed the idea of swapping plants for artwork. I can safely say as a commercial illustrator that this has been one of the best working relationships I have. If as with a normal client I was to be paid in cash there is no way it would get spend on the garden, the money would end up going towards plumbing and tiles and a million other things we need for the house. 
As important as all that is the garden is equally important, the amount of pleasure and enjoyment we get from our garden is immense. Also the opportunity to make any outdoor space productive is always good but not always cheap. Being only paid in plants has meant that I can chose species that normal would be outside my budget, it has allowed me to experiment more. 

When we moved house two and half years ago we where yet again faced with a vast expanse of garden that had been neglected for years, without the support of VNG I would not be make the progress we are with our garden and more importantly I would be missing out on the pleasure and stress release it provides for me.

So it is always a pleasure when one of these arrives on our door step...

As we are so busy with the house and everything this year we have decided to concentrate on just producing fruit, instead of trying to grow everything like we did last year! So I had gone a bit mad with ordering trees and berry bushes this time.

We ended up being one fruit tree short when we did the fruit fence up last week so I ordered a pear 'William Bon Cretien' to go alongside the apple 'Devonshire Quarrenden', cherry 'Stella' and plum 'Stanley' we already have.

I have been meaning to get some raspberries in as we didn't have any last year, I have grown 'All Golds' before and really like them, we has also found that for some reason the birds around here tend to leave them alone, where as they decimate my neighbours red ones? 

And as I was in the mood for soft fruits I also ordered a Tayberry, a Loganberry, a Boysenberry, a Bilberry and another Blackcurrent!

Oh...and 10 more strawberries. I can see that my sweet tooth may have gotten the better of me there! Never mind, at least the garden will be producing something this year, fingers crossed we get a little less rain than last year.

So as ever a thank you to all at Victoriana for giving me an excuse to potter about in the sunshine when I should be tiling the bathroom.