Our evening meeting at Little Channels was very well attended with visiting Rotarians, partners and friends all enjoying a lovely meal and good fellowship.
Our speaker, Suzanne Gaywood MBE, spoke about her experiences exhibiting in the Great Pavilion at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and leading garden tours to Grenada. Between 1998 and 2015 her Grenada exhibits won a total of 12 gold and 5 silver gilt medals. Suzanne illustrated her talk with slides of her exhibits in various stages of construction and scenes of the beautiful island of Grenada.
The structures for the stands, based on scenes from life in Grenada, were mostly built at her home in Woodham Walter by her husband and a band of committed neighbours. Each year they would eagerly await the design for the next masterpiece. The structures varied from a rum distillery complete with working waterwheel, a smoke house with trays of drying cocoa beans, to a rainforest reflecting the hurricane devastation in 2005. Suzanne was disappointed that the latter exhibit only won a silver gilt medal because the rocks did not look real. In 2011 the theme was “Castaway” and the centrepiece was a thatched bamboo hut. The bamboo came from Grenada but it was cheaper to import “thatch on a roll” from California to top it off.
Each stand was lavishly decorated with tropical flowers and spices from Grenada. Suzanne explained that all the flowers were cut, usually a week prior to the Show, so keeping them looking in peak condition was a challenge. Every year 80-90 boxes of flowers had to be unpacked and conditioned.
Over the years Suzanne met many celebrities including Vera Lynn, Susan Hampshire, Trevor McDonald, Joanna Lumley and Joan Collins. Johnson Beharry VC was a special visitor to the show and in 2014 a new cultivar of Heliconia named after him was unveiled on the Grenada stand. She was often featured on the BBC coverage of Chelsea and said that her exhibits were a favourite of Rachel de Thame. One structure, now reassembled in Suzanne’s garden, features the “Rachel de Thame steps” where Rachel sat to deliver her piece to camera. Her Majesty the Queen was a regular visitor to the show and in 2011 she presented Suzanne with an MBE for services to Tourism and Horticulture.
President Anne writes:
I had been looking forward to this evening ever since David Axon showed me it was on the calendar and I’m delighted to say that it more than lived up to expectations. Suzanne has other strings to her bow and I hope we can persuade her to come and speak to us again.