James Wong, Kilgraney House and Herb Gardens, 27th July 2017

James Wong at Kilgraney House and Herb Gardens

Grow for flavour

James Wong is a Royal Botanic Garden, Kew-trained botanist, international author and one of the UK’s top garden designers and Chelsea Flower Show gold medal winner. Based on his book ‘Grow for Flavour’, James discusses how to grow crops for improved flavour and nutrition. Turning the tables on old school gardening advice, James gives helpful tips and tricks to allow you grow tomatoes with 50% more vitamin C, strawberries with 100 times the aroma and chilli with double the fire power, delivering better vegetable flavour and nutrition. This is a talk that no vegetable gardener, beginner or experienced, should miss.

James Wong

James Wong is the author of the internationally best-selling books ‘Grow Your Own Drugs’ and ‘Homegrown Revolution’. His presenting work spans a range of programmes including “Grow Your Own Drugs” and “Great British Garden Revival, as well as Channel News Asia’s “Expensive Eats”.

James has been guest lecturer at universities and horticultural colleges across the UK. He also writes extensively for the RHS and the popular scientific press. In 2008 James co-founded his own garden design studio, Amphibian Designs, which has won four consecutive RHS medals, including golds at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2010 and 2011.

James is passionate about communicating plant science to new audiences in relevant and accessible ways. In 2015 the Sunday Times listed him as one of the Top 20 most influential people in horticulture. With his obsession for food nearly eclipsing his love of plants. James’ small London garden serves as a testing-station for all manner of crops and horticultural ideas from around the world.

Kilgraney House and Herb Gardens

Consisting of a series of interconnecting herbal gardens there is a large kitchen garden, a tea walk, a medicinal herb courtyard, a medieval monastic herb garden and a garden of aromatic and fragrant herbs. The enclosed kitchen garden consists of gravel paths and eleven raised timber beds of varying sizes grouped to form a modern rectangular ‘’potager’’. Next to the kitchen garden is the tea walk, a short gravel path lined on one side with plants suitable for infusions and herbal teas. The medicinal garden, set in a granite courtyard, consists of nine raised beds in Irish oak timber. In a lower courtyard is an aromatic garden planted with herbs for fragrance and also for their usefulness in cosmetic preparations. In an adjoining courtyard there is a modern interpretation of a medieval monastic herb garden with four oak raised beds surrounded on two sides by an oak timber cloister. A circular cosmic garden helps to explain and facilitate our understanding of the ancient belief that there is a connection between people, plants, planets and constellations.