Summer Flower Show 2025

The Brenchley and Matfield Horticultural Society Flower Show was held on Saturday 12th July in a rather warm marquee next to the cricket pavilion, overlooking the village fete.  In the morning exhibitors steadily arrived to fill the tent with beautiful home grown flowers, fruit, vegetables, their flower arrangements and cookery. Art, craft and photography exhibits returned to the show this year and children brought along their innovative monsters, miniature gardens and artwork, which all came together to create a very eclectic and vibrant display.  Our three judges and their assistants were kept very busy with many exhibits to consider before the marquee opened at 1.00 pm for everyone to rush inside to see the show.  You can see pictures here.

Summer Show Award Winners:

  • Mr & Mrs S R Hogg Challenge Cup: for best kept kitchen garden/allotment: Mrs R Nichols
  • Mr & Mrs R A Paterson Challenge Cup: for highest points in vegetable classes: Miss S Coulstock
  • Mr R D Wickham Challenge Cup: for best collection of vegetables: Ms J Ely
  • Diploma for Excellence in Horticulture: for highest points in fruit classes: Mr C Hughes
  • Mr & Mrs Barry Williams Challenge Cup: for best exhibit in rose classes: Mrs H Coombes
  • The Society’s Perennial Cup: for best exhibit in perennial classes: Mrs J Godden
  • Mr & Mrs Stephen White Challenge Cup: for best exhibit in sweet pea classes: Mr & Mrs C Brown
  • The Society’s Challenge Cup: for highest points in flower classes: Mrs H Coombes
  • Mr & Mrs McIntosh Williams Challenge Bowl: for highest points in cookery classes: Mrs J Godden
  • Thompson Challenge Salver: for best exhibit in flower arrangement classes: Mrs J Perry
  • Wheelwright Arms Cup: for best exhibit in the art class: Mrs S Schofield
  • Mr & Mrs D Bowerman Challenge Cup: for best exhibit in the craft class: Mrs AM Richards
  • The President’s Salver: for best photographic exhibit: Ms J Ely
  • Anne Harris Cup: for best exhibit in the children’s classes: Rosie

 

This year’s warm spring and hot summer ensured a good turnout of early fruits and vegetables, including ripe tomatoes, big beetroot and outsized specimens of fennel, garlic and marrow – can anyone tell me when a courgette becomes a marrow!? The winning sweet peas were exceptionally tall and beautiful, and together with the roses, assorted blooms, foliage, cacti and grasses there was much for our visitors to enjoy. The flower arrangements were especially inventive with delicate miniature and petite displays, bold interpretations of The Rain Forest and The Garden of England, as well as a display of pretty buttonholes.  The Society also held a busy and successful plant stall and gardening book sale which will help to fund the show next year.  Thank you to everyone who donated plants, who brought along their wonderful exhibits, and to all who kindly supported The Flower Show. We hope you enjoyed it.  If you have never taken part before then we hope you will be inspired to get growing and showing next year, you’ll be a part of history.

Our Awards Book records our winners over the years with entries going back as far as the 1930s, although the Flower Show has been going far longer than that. Siegfried Sassoon in his “Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man” records the Flower Show Cricket Match which had been held since the 1890s on Flower Show Day, and he describes a visit to the tent while waiting to go in to bat:  “I made my way slowly round the field to have a look at the Flower Show…  I plunged into the odoriferous twilight of the Horticultural Tent. In the warm muffled air the delicate aroma of the elegant sweet peas was getting much the worst of it in an encounter with the more aggressive smell of highly polished onions”.

The Flower Show Cricket Match was revived in 2006 by the late Bob Miller and still takes place every year.  On Sunday 13th July the George Sherston XI played an action-packed match against Matfield Green Cricket Club, with the Flower Show Marquee as its back drop and a Spitfire rolling overhead.  The visiting team included Jeremy Lawson the great great nephew of Siegfried Sassoon who, along with other representatives, read Siegfried’s words in a moving presentation after the match.

Summer Show Gallery