AGS Harlow Carr Autumn Show 2025

Although AGS shows and their attendant sales tables are a big enough draw in their own right, the RHS garden at Harlow Carr provides one of the leading horticultural spectacles in the country, not least when in brilliant autumn garb on a sunny day. The garden also provides a host of potential visitors to our Show benches, and although access can become cramped, the Show gives our leading exhibitors a superb showcase to delight the casual viewer.

Not for the first time Bob and Rannveig Wallis, long-distance travellers from south-west Wales were awarded most of the major awards. Together they won the Mr & Mrs W H Northcliffe Memorial trophy for the best small pan, Cyclamen graecum in its distinctive and localised Cretan subspecies candicum; The Rosemary Cox Trophy for the best small bulb (Crocus goulimyi subsp. leucanthus); the AGS medal for six small pans; and the North of England Horticultural Society’s Cup (commemorating the former proprietors of Harlow Carr) for the Open Section aggregate. I also loved their Cyclamen rohlfsianum with more than 50 flowers.

Bob and Rannveig were also given Certificates of Merit for the Rhodes form of Cyclamen maritimum, (uniformly very dwarf and with tiny beautifully patterned leaves), the lovely, large-flowered Peloponnesian Crocus niveus.Finally they also won the Farrer Medal for the best plant in the Show, a large and very uniform plant of the lovely blue Hyacinthoides lingulata.

Anne Wright from nearby York has been delighting us with a wealth of new dwarf spring-flowering Narcissus hybrids, but she has also worked with autumn-flowering Amaryllidaceae. The vigour that hybridity lends is common knowledge, and was plain to behold in four clones which resulted from crosses between Galanthus reginae-olgae and G. peshmenii, the two autumn-flowering snowdrop species. These are named ‘Dryad Baroness’, ‘Dryad Countess’ and ‘Dryad Duchess’. The fourth, ‘Dryad Regina’,  won her a Certificate of Merit.

Vigour is perhaps less evident in the delicate autumn-flowering hybrids Narcissus x alleniae (N. viridiflorus x obsoletus) and N. x perez-larae (N. canvillesii x obsoletus), but they are desirable little plants for all that and won Anne another certificate when benched in a threesome with N. deficiens. The last-named appears to be yet another split in the camp of N. serotinus (as indeed is N. obsoletus), Mediterranean specials of late autumn, and I was indecently overjoyed to see that the name of the botanist who coined this new assemblage is…..Moron!

Last, but by no means least, I should pay credit to the excellent miniature garden exhibited by Lawrence Peet. This contained no plants in flower, but was constructed, mostly of silver saxifrages, with such art and permanence as to fully deserve its unusual accolade of a Certificate of Merit.

Reporter John Richards

Photographer Jon Evans