The show must go on John Peace

In a first for the National Chrysanthemum Society, the Late National Show was held online

When we heard the disappointing news that the Late National Show had to be cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions, the National Chrysanthemum Society (NCS) management team decided we were not going to be beaten.

The NCS team met via Zoom every week to plan a virtual show. It was agreed we would ask our members to enter the virtual

National Early Chrysanthemum Champion for the past 20 years, John has also won the best exhibit award 15 times.

show by uploading their exhibits onto Facebook from their own home, garage or greenhouse. We were astounded with the fantastic response we had, with more than 100 quality exhibits from over 50 exhibitors. Obviously we couldn't judge to the standard of the real show, so to keep it fun and lighthearted, we decided that anyone who presented an exhibit was deserving of an award. To support this we created a virtual show award system of coloured ribbons. Blue for a good exhibit, red for a decent exhibit and yellow for a credible exhibit.

To our delight we attracted new exhibitors to the show, who normally wouldn’t be able to make it to the event in Staffordshire. One of these was Jim Howard from Darlington. He entered three classes and was awarded a blue ribbon in all of them. His main exhibit was three vases of five singles.

One of the main classes for the virtual show was the large exhibition blooms – and it truly was a battle of the giants!

There were some cracking entries in this class from Ivor Mace, Barry Cundiff, Andy Whickham and Ron Garrod. In a normal, real show, the judges would have found it very hard to split the first, second and third. Ivor, Andy and Barry were awarded a blue ribbon and Ron, a fairly new grower, was awarded a very well-deserved red.

In the medium exhibition class for the TF Pattison Perpetual Trophy, NCS president Roger Brownbridge and David Arnull went head to head. In a normal judging situation I think Roger would have pipped it, but at the virtual show both were deemed good exhibits and both given blue ribbons.

Another hotly contested class was the individual, which calls for five different types of chrysanthemums. There were three entries in this

Barry Cundiff won a blue ribbon for his exhibit

My bloom of the show was ‘William Sydney’, exhibited by Ngaire Hall Jim Howard a ended his first National Show and won blue ribbons in all the classes he entered

Barry and Daphne Hogg’s five vases of five incurves