The RHS visit me!

On the 19th January, Lucinda Costello (Horticultural Manager) and Katy Gaunt (Assistant Horticultural Exhibitor Manager) came up from London to meet me and discuss my proposed stand for Gardener's World Live.


We had already spoken on the phone and via email and I had spent several weeks drawing up some pretty ambitious plans for a stand. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited and keen to impress them with what I proposed to do....


I was well prepared. I had detailed sketches and had also tried to get to grips with a program called Google Sketch-up... a FREE package that allows you to create 3D drawings and move and rotate these and even walk into them... take a look if you have not seen it before. I found it a brilliant way to get an idea of the stand space I wanted and how much space everything would take up. This mock up is just to gauge space ....

My plans are to re-create a WildlifeKate patch, with lots of the feeders, nest boxes and other gadgets I regularly use... the things you see me blog about and you see on my live cameras. I will have cams on the stand wired back to a monitor and my website live streaming images as well. I plan on visitors being able to see everything in context and leaving my stand brimming with ideas about what they could do in their patch!

The centre-piece  of my stand will be my WildlifeKate 'Wildlife Hub'.... my dream Wildlife garden building, with all the additions any discerning wildlife enthusiast would want...there will be a separate blog post all about the plans for that! I will be working closely with Phil Clark, an amazing carpenter as well as a wildlife enthusiast, who is going to turn my dream building into a reality!


As education is a fundamental part of what I do, I also want to have a group of school children working on wildlife projects throughout the show. These will include pupils from my schools and other schools I have contacts with. Their work will be displayed on my stand and it will be a wonderful opportunity for them too.

Lucinda, Katy and I hit it off immediately! Over mugs of tea and homemade Victoria sponge, I showed them all my plans, talked them through my ambitious drawings and our combined enthusiasm made for an amazing morning! They loved all my ideas.


The most fantastic moment for me is when they laid out the plan of the whole show on my sitting room floor and decided where my WildlifeKate stand was going to go...... a 9m x 8m stand, right in the middle of the Gardening for Wildlife section of the show! Perfect! I simply couldn't ask for more.

The three of us could have carried on talking all day, but they had another appointment to go to, so sadly our meeting had to end. I know that this is the start of something great and I just can't wait to get going!