Garden...

Regular readers of my blipfoto blogwill know that I did a garden for the Dig The City Urban Garden Festival last year. It’s become a much anticipated festival in the Manchester's calendar. It took me a year to design, plan, build and grow the plants for the garden. I’d never done anything like it before and had quite a few wakings-up in the middle of the night worrying what had I got myself into? But in the end it all came right and we had something of a success on our hands.

The guys I was working with wanted to do another one in 2016 and I did a plan. And then there was nothing said about it from Dig The City all Autumn. We’d had a meeting for the 2015 festival back in September 2014. I kind of forgot about it but by Christmas it struck me as odd that no one had said a thing. Eventually I called Dig The City to see what was going on. I got through to one of the organisers who I’d had a lot to do with in the planning of my garden and he said, sadly, that it wasn’t going to happen this year.

He was sad, I was sad. But there was nothing much I could do about it so I shelved my plan and left it at that. I saw the two guys who had a lot to do with the festival last year, at the Chinese New Year Festival that they also organised. Nothing was said then. So I was very surprised to see an email pop up in my email box from them saying that the garden festival was back on, albeit in a slightly different form, alongside the Jazz Festival and the Manchester, European City of Science 2016 Festival and a couple of other events. They were looking for gardens and were contacting people who had a proven record of producing the goods and those goods were of a good quality. *blushes*

A first I thought no way. Not enough time and the garden I’d planned was too big and complicated to do in the shortened period of time. But I thought I’d go in and have a chat (see ‘cakes’). As I rode into the city centre on the tram I had no idea what sort of garden I could do. Then inspiration struck. By the time I’d got to Blackfriars House I could actually see it in my mind. I didn’t promise as I needed to talk to the other guys about it.

Well, they are on board as well. So last night, with one eye on the England/Ireland Six Nations rugby match, I did a quick design. With help, good luck and good organisation, it should be doable. Here we go again…..