Timsbury Horticultural Society’s December meeting was an evening of music provided by The Stanton Drew Hand Bell Ringers, who came to celebrate the Christmas season.

As the bells belong to St Mary’s Church in Stanton Drew, they began the evening with The Bells of St Mary’s, which is their theme tune. The first half was a fitting tribute to the Horticultural Society, by keeping to the gardening theme and performing: An English Country Garden, The Cuckoo, Winter and Spring from the Four Seasons, followed by Linden Lea.

At the half-way break, some of our members took up the invitation to have a go at handbell ringing and singing along to the well known tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Afterwards, the group played a number of Christmas carols with a sing-along by all the members and the evening ended with an American pot luck supper. We all had a great time.

Prior to this meeting, the Chairman, Graham Nicholls, presented Dawn Hillman with £100 worth of gardening vouchers in appreciation of the catering work she has carried out over many years for the society.

At our January meeting, we welcomed Gill Hazell, who is a well-known local and national exhibitor of sweet peas and who is also on the committee of the National Sweet Pea Society.

Gill gave us a splendid talk on how to grow and show sweet peas, first showing slides of the various sweet peas in cultivation, and then of the allotment where she double dug trenches, put rotted manure and fertilizer into the trench and backfilling planted sweet peas grown from seed.

The plants were staked and grown on before being laid down along the base of five to six stakes and allowed to grow upwards again. Jill showed how she germinates the seed using damp kitchen towel paper, sowing seed in the autumn for National shows which are early and now for the local summer shows.

Gill finally demonstrated her ability to grow top quality flowers by showing slides of the exhibits that she and other top growers have put up from eight to twelve vases of sweet peas, each vase having up to a dozen stems. Afterwards, members had a chance to browse through books on sweet peas and buy seed.

The next meeting is our main event of the year on February 14th at Conygre Hall when Andy McIndoe, winner of many Gold medals at Chelsea for Hilliers, will be speaking on ‘Planting for Wildlife’ starting at 7.30 p.m.

More of our society can be seen at: http://timsburyhorts.webplus.net

Graham Nicholls