Garden Media Winners 2023

Garden Media Guild Awards 2023 - held at the Savoy in London

In the past, I have looked at the results of the Garden Media Guild Awards online but last Friday was the first time I had gone to the awards lunch and seen it all ‘in person’ so to speak. I think awards are always interesting because they introduce you to people whose work you may not have come across as well as work you hope will win because you have enjoyed it.

I thought over the next couple of weeks it might be fun to share some of the winners and their work here on the blog. Books seemed like a good place to start. The Winner of the Peter Seabrook Practical Book of the Year was Emma Crawforth for Things to do with Plants - 50 Ways to connect to the botanical world. Each of the 50 ‘things’ offers a different activity or insight into how we can interact with plants, be it from making perfumes, basket weaving, or making tea, to reducing noise, improving office productivity, supporting garden wildlife or building a den. This sounds like a fun book for all ages.

Then there was The Garden Book of the Year. This was won by Shahina Ghazanfar for Plants of the Qur’ān. Plants of the Qur’ān is the first book to explore and highlight the history of the plants mentioned in the Qur’ān, many of which are part of our everyday life, from pomegranates and grapes to ginger and garlic. Each of these plants are beautifully illustrated with unique botanical paintings by artist Sue Wickison, drawn from living specimens in the wild. I have just watched the most fascinating short video by the botanical illustrator Sue Wickinson which you can see here where she talks about the journey of this project. The amount of time spent studying each plant in the wild and the level of detail in every drawing is incredible.

One more for this blog post, the Dr David Hessayon Garden Writer of the Year. This was won by Matthew Collins. A writer, he is also Head Gardener at the Garden Museum in London. You can read a profile of him here, and I liked this quote: It sounds oversimplified, but gardening for me really began as a desire to know the names of plants and to fill in what suddenly appeared as a substantial and probably quite important general knowledge gap!” Perhaps that’s because the ‘naming of plants’ connects to one of the plant stories I am researching for the second series of the podcast.

In other news the second pick for Pick of the Year is in, more news will follow. This week I recorded the most lovely conversation between a gardener in the UK and a gardener in NZ. It had taken a little bit of setting up, time difference and all that and as we settled down at 8pm on Wednesday evening, our new found NZ friend was heading into Thursday, 13 hours ahead of us. I love bringing together gardeners from different sides of the world (some may recall we did it in the Camellia Plant Story) and it was wonderful again, to watch two gardeners who share a passion about a particular group of plants discuss and enthuse together about those plants, I look forward to sharing it. Finally I took a call from my daughter yesterday…”I’ve found you a plant story!” I am very lucky that my family are very tolerant of my plant story obsession!