First prize in award for nine plates of apples and pears won by Adrian Baggaley
Another glorious fruit show at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Halls in London this week saw our man from the north, Adrian Baggaley, again scoop up the ‘First Prizes’ and special awards, along with Doug Palmer and Bill Harrison, for their exhibits of apples and pears. It must be one of the wonders of London that you can come in off the streets of Westminster and step into another world more evocative of a small country show than SW1 just around the corner from the throngs of Victoria Station and the Embankment.
The ‘Great Autumn Show’, as it used to be called, is the opportunity for keen amateur fruit and vegetable growers to gain some of the highest accolades in the show calendar and give Londoners a rare treat. But what perversity this year caused the RHS to split up the fruit and vegetables and distributed them between the two Halls so that the stunning scene of massed fruit and vegetables was lost; such a pity!
Fruit Forum
- Pear exhibit from RHS Gardens Wisley
As a member of the RHS I am at a loss to understand why the Autumn Fruit and Vegetable Show was so disjointed this year. Why were the vegetables in one hall and the fruits in another? Worse still, the fruits were spread over several tables on opposite sides of the hall. This not only reduced their impact and significance, it must have created obstacles for the grower-exhibitors who travelled from all over the country.
For me it was all summed up by the sight of bunches of grapes forced to occupy too small a space as though they were an afterthought. I have seen many costermongers who took greater pride on their stalls than was evidenced in the planning of this Show! I know that the RHS is capable of much better than this, what went wrong?
The emphasis was clearly on shopping opportunities with the sale of plants and products from nurseries and manufacturers taking pride of place.
Please will the relevant departments in the RHS get together, consult with exhibitors and the Fruit and Vegetable Committee with the aim of restoring standards. But more than that we need to integrate exhibition and showing with education. The RHS judges, the Lindley Library should provide supportive exhibitions on the history and culture of growing fruits and vegetables. Why not an exhibit of the history of fruit and vegetable growing in London? Why not an exhibition on the history of illustrations of fruit and vegetables from the most ancient times to the modern? The Lindley Library is only yards away from the halls and houses remarkable archives of woodblock engravings, water colours, drawings etc.
The cultivation of foods has been at the centre of life in London even before there was a place with that name. Plough marks discovered by archaeologists in what is now Bermondsey on the south bank of the Thames, attest to the presence of permanent settlements in the pre-Roman era, and the importance of food production!
The exhibition of fruits and vegetables in London this year gave the impression that they were no longer really relevant to life in London!