Show comes up roses
How do you make a rock look like a toad? Or Lego like an insect? Or bake a cake celebrating women’s suffrage?
All these answers, and a great many more to questions you’d never thought to ask before, were on display at the North Connel and District Horticultural Show in the Victory Hall in Benderloch on Saturday.
This is the event’s 59th year, and chairperson Jane Eccles said she was ‘delighted by the turn-out, and delighted by the number of entries’.
She added: ‘We are a bit down on flowers because of the weather, but we have more potted plants. We aim to be a friendly community show. We get tremendous support from the schools. There is something for everybody.’
Intermingling the usual magnificent begonias, chocolate crispies, asters, mini quiches, cacti, pickles, flower arrangements in a cup and saucer, pea pods, marmalade and marrows, were the more eccentric entries for Lego insects and – new this year – wonky vegetables, which were given a dimension of character by googly eyes.
Sponge cakes were decorated on a musical instrument theme, featuring a fine set of tartan bagpipes and a squeezebox, while four cakes marked the centenary of voting rights for women. The first prize sported the suffragettes’ rosette, placards imploring ‘As long as we have not votes, we must be disorderly’, an Edwardian hat, railings and handcuffs.
Ingenuity was also detectable in the decorated stones, a flower arrangement based on Star Wars, cress growing in an egg shell, and a tableful of dough pooches in many shapes, inspired by the Chinese year of the dog. All the while, bustling volunteers whizzed trays of delicious fancies past punters’ noses, who often followed them to a table and a cup of tea. This year the show’s small committee, which meets four times a year, is needing more people to join it, or as friends of the show to help at the annual plant sale and show.
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