An Interview With Ben from Higgledy Garden

Ben Raynard is the horticultural genius behind Higgledy Garden. He is currently busy creating a glorious new border for this year’s festival of annual flowers ‘both hardy and half hardy’. We asked him a few questions about Higgledy and what’s he’s up to at Port Eliot.

Can you tell us a little bit about Higgledy Garden and its ethos?

“Higgledy Garden is an online resource for those wishing to get themselves started in creating their own cut flower patch from scratch. The site has several hundred articles relating mainly to the growing annual flowers from seed. I try and keep the content on the site easy to absorb and hopefully inspiring. I encourage folk to grow their flowers without chemicals…not because I’m a yoghurt weaving, crystal hippy but because they are simply unnecessary. Chemicals are best left for ravers and dictators. Annuals flowers are pretty tough and are quite happy in poor soils…they’ve been doing their thing pretty well for tens of thousands of years before the likes of Round-Up or Miracle-Gro came about…most plant fertilizers are like Crack to flowers…once you start you can’t stop. Just say NO! (That was a Higgledy Public Information Message).

Although most of the customers to the Higgledy seed shop are female there are still a good deal of men starting cutting patches too. I myself have been growing for ten years and I’m a double hard alpha male…I’ve got a hammer and everything. Back in the ’70s, before the collapse of the British flower industry, nearly all of the growers were hammer owning alphas like me.

The ethos of the business is grounded in it being approachable and not too high brow. There is a plethora of crispy establishment types wittering on about soil ph and why a Surrey garden should never be soiled with yellow flowers or God forbid a Zinnia…I try and run my business as an antidote to that. I don’t suggest that perfect blooms are the goal…they’re not…I can sell people seeds…and I can sell them flowers…what I can’t sell them is the magic that happens in between. A cut flower garden is not instant gratification…it’s a long drawn out, sensual, pleasure fest….and all yours for under a tenner. If you want it, come and get it.

What has sparked the recent revival in cut flower gardening?

It was only a matter of time that this would happen… it has followed off the back of the resurgence in growing veg. People are simply more into growing things again, we have realised how rewarding this relationship with the soil truly is. Also we are considerably more aware of green issues…I don’t want to hijack this article with an eco warrior rant but flying in hundreds of jets every week from Kenya and Columbia with full cargoes of flowers is mindbendingly short-sighted. We spend more money in the UK on imported flowers than we spend on music….why? we can grow our own? And what’s more they are far better quality. Most imported flowers are grown in huge industrial greenhouses… gigantic mono-cultures ,and the result is the floral equivalent to a spray tanned footballer’s wife.

What has been the Higgledy Garden project at Port Elliot?

We have simply sown up a 40 metre by 3 metre bed with a range of annual flowers… both hardy and half hardy. Rather than keep the ordered and traditional vibe of a productive flower garden, with the same variety grown along a single row, we have mixed it up to offer more of a meadow feel. The tricky part is trying to make it look tip top for the festival. Generally in my own patch I would aim to have flowers from May until early December. This of course means that the garden is never fully in bloom at any one time. In the walled garden at Port Elliot we have made a mass sowing on one day, giving the flowers 14 weeks to get with the disco and strut their funky chickens. Hopefully they will all erupt into a flowering frenzy for the end of July…if they don’t I am going to look like a complete banana.