If you want to attend, be sure to keep a watch on the BOC pages on the website at http://wsbeorchids.org.uk/boc.

You’ll be able to register for the event and receive a discount price from mid October this year – details available twitter.

Yep, that’s right, the second annual Writhlington Autumn Orchid Festival is a mere two weeks away! We’re all getting excited, walking the school corridors with clipboards, planning where each trade stand and each display will go!

As with last year, there will be lectures throughout the day in the Theatre, as well as tea and those all important sales in the Orchid Café! We’ve got Displays as part of the Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset Orchid Society Show with Burnham Nurseries among the traders at this year’s show. It’s also, of course, a great chance for you to have a look around the greenhouses and talk to the enthusiastic students.

So – we hope to see you there! £2 entry, at Writhlington School.

For anyone who’s been watching the banner at the top of our homepage, this won’t come as a surprise:

We’re going to the Bristol Garden Life Show! This new event, organised by Bristol City Council is designed to get people into gardening. We’re going along, and teaming up with our good friends at the Bristol University Botanic Garden, to promote plant conservation across the world. This three-day extravaganza will take place from April 15 to 17, right in the centre of Bristol.

The practical upshot of this is that you can stroll into Cabot Circus between the 15th and 17th of April and talk to us about your orchids, our orchids, or even buy yourself a new one! We look forward to seeing you there!

New Labels

With every orchid geographically positioned in it’s relavent section in the greenhouse, it seems sensible to give it a label telling you, when you buy it, where it came from! This means that whenever you buy a plant from us now, it will have a third label in (as well as the price and name labels). This one will tell you where your plant comes from, where in the greenhouse we grow it, and how we keep that section. Neat huh?

The Greenhouses at Night

The ‘Christmas Orchids’ event, as we’re calling it, will be your chance to have a look at the orchids with a glass of mulled wine and a mince pie!  The event will be on Thursday 16th December from 7 – 9 PM.  Full details can be found here.

This gave rise to our brand new ‘Upcoming Events‘ page!  Every date you could possibly need, it’s basically your one-stop for orchid events at Writhington (and further afield).

In order to do this, we’ve made a poster that is available for download.  If you live within reasonable travelling distance of Writhlington, we’d love it if you would print out one of our posters and stick it in your window, or village hall noticeboard, or lamp post outside!  The more the merrier, so your help in publicising is much appreciated!

Download Poster

The Writhlington Autumn Orchid Festival is your chance to have a look around the new school greenhouses, talk to orchid experts from the Somerset, Wiltshire & Dorset Orchid Society, purchase Orchids and sundries from various trade, and dine in the brand new Orchid Café.

WAOF will run from 10am-4pm on Saturday 25th September at Writhlington School. Entrance £1.

WAOF 2010 is the first ever Writhlington Orchid Festival and we’re planning to come in with a bang! We have links growing with various departments in the school, including Drama, Art, Business and, most recently, Food Technology.

Among those present will be:

• Somerset, Wiltshire & Dorset Orchid Society show. This event will feature the best orchid growers have to offer from across the three counties. The event is judged and it is an excellent opportunity to visit an orchid show.
• Writhlington Greenhouses. This event will be taking place at the Writhlington School facilities, so, naturally, you will have an excellent chance to look around our state-of-the-art new greenhouses and learn about specific genera from our enthusiastic students.
• Lectures. The Drama department have agreed to let us use their awesome new theatre to stage lectures from various speakers about orchid related topics.
• The Orchid Café. What would a day be without food? A group of Food Technology Students make up the Orchid Café and will be serving a range of cakes and scones throughout the day, as well as lunch for those who wish. Tea and Coffee will also be available in the dining hall.

I’m quite looking forward to this one!

Fortunately (as I’m sure you’re aware!) we now have a brand new, State of the art Greenhouse and Micropropagation facility which we are all very keen for you to come and have a look round!  We’re hoping to have open days on a regular basis, which will include tours of the greenhouses, lectures and have-a-go at Microprop, as well as various other features from other departments at the school.

The Open Days will hopefully start from October this year, after our Grand Opening Event in Late September.  We’re keen to make this a huge event and look forward to seeing you all there.

Exact dates for this event will hopefully be confirmed by the end of May.  Watch this space!

London Show Team 2010

I’m pleased to report that today has been a very successful day at the london orchid show.  We’ve been almost literally swept off our feet with people buying plants and talking to us about our plants.  In addition to all of this, we have won a Silver Gilt medal for our display of Orchids, and Luke Barnes won a Silver medal for the Scientific research project.

Fortunately ‘completely forgot’ is a bit of an exaggeration! We’ve been working quite hard last week to not only catch up on all the work we missed the week before, but to gather together quite an impressie array of plants for this years show.

In addition to our usual display of plants, there will be posters from our recent Sikkim Expedition, as well as a Sales Table and Luke Barnes’ Stand from the Big Bang last week end.

It really is going to be an amazing year.  As well as all of this, it’s the last year of our Orchid Project members; Luke Lucas and Ben Stokes.  More information on this coming throughout the week.

See you there!

I’m sure I’ll be updating the Dates pages with dates for your calender over the summer holiday.  Of course – plant’s don’t stop when school does so we’ll be in each day to water.

Next year we’ll be off to London orchid show again, as well as the Botanic Gardens Conservation International conference in Durban, South Africa.  We’ve also got local shows coming up next year including one at the Welsh Botanic Garden and the Bristol University Botanic Garden.  We should also have a redesign active in the early stages of the new year.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank you all for watching, reading and keeping up with me with exams etc.  It’s been a great year and I hope that I’ll see you all for the next 3 years.  No idea what then – hopefully I’ll be able to train someone else, but that’s a story for another day!

A personal record for me as it has only taken 1 and a quarter hours to extract the recording and upload it!

The display looks fantastic and I would like to say a public ‘well-done’ to Ben Stokes, Luke Lucas and Simon Pugh-Jones who made up the set up team.  They’ve put a lot of effort in and it shows!

For those of you already asking yourselves when we’ll be on TV, we’re being filmed tomorrow (Wednesday) and could be on any time after that, though we’re 90% sure it will be the Wednesday show.

Photos Follow:

The prayer flags are visible from all over the pavilion!

The Flow makes up the center piece of the display