Comments on: At The RHS Harvest Festival

By: Martin ling

Martin ling — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 19:53:56 +0000

Was that Basil Fawlty assessing the beet root?

By: Janet M

Janet M — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 18:08:17 +0000

How very British.

By: belle

belle — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 17:50:46 +0000

gorgeous photos. inspired to photograph the rejects!

By: Peter Holford

Peter Holford — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 14:05:02 +0000

Damaged goods but what do they taste like? Unfortunately the supermarkets prize appearance above flavour and while it’s good to see such bounty one can’t help feeling that the criteria for judging are not complete. On the other hand I’m jealous of the onions – I grew some in our cold, wet, heavy Pennine soil. No prizes for guessing what happened.

By: Jacqueline Sarsby

Jacqueline Sarsby — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 12:57:19 +0000

Thank you so much for showing me where you have Charles Jones’s photos already on the internet. I have sent them to a friend, but she receives your emails regularly so she may already have come across them.

By: the gentle author

the gentle author — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 12:25:28 +0000

In reply to Jacqueline Sarsby.

Here is Charles Jones, Jacqueline: http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/03/09/charles-jones-gardener-photographer/

By: Michelle

Michelle — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 12:21:28 +0000

Absolutely lovely.

I love the picture of the giant pumpkins, wearing their prize ribbons like tam-o’-shanters.

By: Jacqueline Sarsby

Jacqueline Sarsby — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 11:29:11 +0000

These photos were a delight, but then all the sequences you show are fascinating. I wonder if you know ‘The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones’ published by Thames and Hudson in 1998. Charles Jones’s black and white photographs of vegetables and flowers are wonderful portraits, found in a trunk in Bermondsey Market by Sean Sexton in 1981. They were gold-toned gelatin silver prints made from glass plate negatives. Apparently Jones (b. 1866 in Wolverhampton) at one time offered in ‘Popular Gardening’ to take photographs of people’s gardens for half-a-crown an image, but none of these are known. Towards the end of his life he used his glass-plate negatives as cloches to protect his young plants, and no-one knows where any of his negatives are if they still exist. I too have photographed vegetables and flowers, in fact the whole joy of the country horticultural show, in black and white, and they were a feature in ‘Country Living’, but Mr Jones’s photographs take my breath away. Yours delight me too.

By: BT

BT — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 11:24:08 +0000

Interesting that beaniness is deemed a fault in beans

By: Gary Arber

Gary Arber — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 10:08:02 +0000

Standards have slipped from the produce shows in my youth, for an exhibitor to submit a split carrot to a major event would have been unbelievable in those days.
Gary