It’s difficult to make any garden evenly wonderful all year. Inevitably it will look at its very best in a particular season. Nevertheless, careful design and planting can and should mean some aspect – a particular space or planting – will bring joy at any time. It’s important then to celebrate plants at the time they are at their best, when the stage is perhaps their own.  

My mother-in-law was an accomplished gardener who created beautiful, personal outdoor spaces on two continents. She frequently awarded a prize to the best plant of that day or that week to acknowledge its contribution to the season, and it’s a habit we continue.

Alwyn was a remarkable woman. After graduating from Reading, she and her husband Ken started the marvellously named Pig Improvement Company (the moniker was also her idea). You may mock but there were already 800 million pigs raised every year in the world (now it’s closer to 1billion), so it was and is big business. PIC as it become known, focused on breeding animals which produced more pigs and grew leaner quicker to meet the ever-increasing demand for pork.  A business which started in rural Oxfordshire soon grew in Europe and then throughout the world (Last year the company had profits of over £100m). 

For all of that early growth, Alwyn ran the export division, and she was a true but often unheralded trailblazer. She was the first person to export live animals behind the Iron Curtain and to China. To facilitate her work she taught herself French, Spanish and some Bulgarian. She navigated tangled bureaucracies, byzantine regulations and unreliable transport, variously charming, cajoling or steamrolling everyone in her way. When the business expanded to the States she established a new home in southern Kentucky, a culture shock indeed from a farmhouse on the edge of the Cotswolds. But she made an amazing welcoming home, where she was constantly entertaining PIC’s customers, partners and employees with wit, aplomb and charm and often a superb dinner. Main Farm holds a special place in my heart as it was where I met Liz – but that’s another story. Kentucky is a place of fecund soil and generous weather – and Alwyn and Ken created a beautiful and seemingly ever-expanding plot, mixing the semi tropical with the more traditional, the old world and the new.  It was a mantra in the household that it was always ‘a critical time’ in the garden.

Alwyn moved back to Oxfordshire when her husband died 30 years ago and created a very different but equally beautiful garden around her new house – back in the village where it all began decades before. She died in 2023, at 90 years old after a wonderful, extraordinary life. Liz inherited many wonderful things from her, including her green fingers, love and enthusiasm for gardening. It remains a critical time not only in our garden but in all the landscapes we are fortunate to look after and contribute to. And we are always looking out for the plant which wins today’s prize so watch out for awards in coming months

We named our gardening venture after the open space, along the Cam, which our house (almost) overlooks. In the heart of Great Chesterford it got its name because of is use as a watering hole for working horses. “Til the first quarter of the 20^th Century there was an open road leading right into the rive so that horses could be taken in …. to drink and wash their legs. When water carts were filled, the horses backed the carts right into the middle of the river, up to the horses’ chests, and the man stood on the shafts of the cart and filled the water cart with a pail. The river supplied water for plough engines, threshing engines and drinking water for sheep and cattle”[1]

The green has been an important gathering place in recent years, hosting carol singing, VE  Day celebrations and especially in a socially distanced capacity during Covid. The green also hosts a traditional funfair as part of Great Chesterford’s annual Steam-Up.

It’s a fairly lean space, mostly grass, but a great place for children to play and, on a pleasant afternoon like today, mums and children gather there after school. Small knots of boys and girls run and chase or explore: a very old-fashioned sort of play, built from imagination, energy and enthusiasm. Enormous willows dripping branches to the water and in spring, aconites and crocuses edge the little ditch leading to the sluice gate.

Our neighbour’s house leads down to the river. He has built nesting boxes that have seen blue tits, great tits, robins and last year barn owls. I was lucky enough to catch the male owl hunting low over the water meadow one evening, a spectral, awesome sight. The river also has cormorants, heron, little egret, moorhens, kingfisher, ducks and geese. And most recently a family of otters.

The Cam here is a rare English chalk stream. Years ago, I could walk 5 minutes from our house, see trout rising and spend several happy hours flailing the water with my fly, only very rarely catching anything other than a branch. But what a way to spend a summer evening! The fish are rare now and the river has suffered over the years from off run from new building and farming, and from artificial shaping of the banks to suit other uses. But there is a silver lining in Affinity Water investing a significant sum to address some of these issues, and we hope this and the involvement of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers can restore the river to its former glory.

Why did we name our company after this green? Because it reflects our approach to gardening and design. It does what is wanted and needed of it, sometimes providing play, sometimes a social space, often an opportunity for quiet reflection. It is beautiful. It fits in with the village, with the river and the water meadow beyond.

It is simply the right space in the right place.

And it is home.

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[1] Times of the Chesterfords 1999