Sixth Mediterranean Garden Fair - 2014

Thank you to everyone who came along to support our sixth Mediterranean Garden Fair. What an amazing day we had on Saturday, but, thank goodness we had sunshine – many of those attending remembered the deluges of 2012 at the same venue so it was a great bonus to have good weather this year. This was our first major event under the banner of our newly registered Portuguese association. The new group has fiscal and legal status and removes the concern of being challenged about our activities.

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A new layout for the plant nurseries put everyone all together which made for a spectacular show of good quality plants. Highlights included good specimens of Yucca rostrata, the rarely offered Dracaena cinnabari and specialist native plant nursery SIGMETUM with seeds of Portuguese native plants offered for sale for the first time at our event. There was a very good selection of succulents on offer and in all 18 plant nurseries attended. We distributed a lot of free garden advice leaflets and a lot of free garden advice too ! The talks were popular, and the propagation workshop was quite a challenge to do in two languages but fortunately our visual aids (secateurs and soggy compost) worked just fine ! There was a special talk on Hoyas from Alan Butler of Brookside Nurseries, now based in Spain. The other talks were on Top Ten herbs for the Algarve from Medical Herbalist Daisy Mae and Fernanda Botelho gave us all encouragement to eat our flowers with her talk on edible flowers and culinary herbs.

The parking arrangements seemed to work well for the visitors, another first for this year was the shuttle bus. It was very popular and did a good job in ferrying those who wanted lifts to and from the car park. The Plant Creche was a new feature and allowed everyone to collect plants with their cars from one point at the end of their visit. These new arrangements were a huge experiment, and it became obvious that there is work to do on refining the arrangements for parking for our own hard working volunteers and for stall holders. Our less mobile visitors welcomed the provision of disabled parking on the site and this must be part of plans for the future. Thank you to anyone affected for your understanding on the day.

The MGAP Plant Store

The MGA plant stall had a wonderful response from you and a big attraction this year was a stunning selection of Salvias including S. discolor, S. involucrata, S. guaranatica and the lovely little S. x jamensis. We had Amaryllis belladonna and Scilla peruviana bulbs for sale as well as second hand books, and the new Algarve Wild Flowers book on the MGA Info table inside the building. Not all proceeds are profit as we have had to pay for the books and some specially commissioned plants, and the cleaning of the car park, but we hope for a significant sum after all that has been taken into account. Our Treasurer, Richard Hickman, has been working hard on the accounting system that we must have for our new association so it is important to have our records accurate for the AGM coming up in 2015. There were also considerable set up costs this year for the new association so it was doubly important to make the event a success.

The real headline is the record breaking number of paying visitors to the event this year, a whopping 921 people !! Taken together with all the volunteers and the stall holders and helpers we had about 1,000 people on site during the day. Lots of smiling faces, lots of bags full of plants and best of all, fabulous weather for our annual bash.

A car full!

The event could not take place without the help and hard work of all our volunteers who turned out on the day, many many thanks to everyone who participated in making the event such a success. Many thanks also for the donations of nice clean plant pots in various sizes, they will go to good homes and be appearing at next year’s fair suitably filled with good plants !

The strong and growing interest in Mediterranean gardening and the need for good quality information, and appropriate plants, has been proved – and now we have had the best possible start for our gardening year. Everyone will be keen to get planting their new purchases, it was a very beautiful day and we all had a lot of fun. As always, please do let me know your thoughts, comments and suggestions if you were present on the day.