The Nantucket Garden Club (NGC) show was a wonderful venue and gave us first timers a very good time and warm welcome. Sally and Peter Nash hosted about seven of us after the Baltimore ADS Show and they were very good hosts indeed. Nancy and I even did the “trains, planes, boats, and autos” venture to get there while others flew in from Boston. Nancy and I wanted a little East Coast adventure and had a good time on the train and ferries.
The 38th Annual NGC daffodil show took place on Barrett’s Farm, an combo restaurant, grocery store, meeting center, nursery, and farm. They even had a wind mill which was spinning really fast! The flower show took place in the nursery green/glass house and was bright and sunny. I noted this first because I visited with only a camera and no tripod. As Kirby and Tom can testify, it is impossible to photograph shows in dark settings without a tripod. The brightness convened me to photograph the show winners using a hand-held camera.
I have not seen any statistics about the show yet but my impression was it was a large show with many participants. It reminded me of some of the New Zealand shows that have such a good community involvement. There were a number of children either “helping” us stage flowers are actually entering their own flowers. One little boy helped Becky Fox-Matthews and myself stage a Quinn and I observed extreme patience on Becky’s part. It was clear that this was a community event as there was a large crowd visiting throught out the show.
I might add this was my very first daffodil show where I got sun burn too!
I have attached a few show photos starting with the show entrance, preparing flowers, staging, visitors and some of the many children.
This is the last post I am sending for the 38th Annual Nantucket show unless someone points out I missed something.
Cheers,
Ben
We owe Ben SO many thanks for doing this documentary on the Nantucket show!.
THANK YOU very much Ben ! ! !
Tom
Ben, welcome to the ranks of daffodil show photographers! I think this is the first time we’ve seen the ADS award winners from Nantucket.
Aside from the fact that about a quarter of this year’s American shows were canceled, there are still a lot of shows from which we’ve seen no photos. Tom and I can go to about 5 shows, but that’s about a quarter of the shows in normal years.
For those of you who are inspired to photograph your shows next year, here are two things to keep in mind.
One is that it takes time. In addition to photographing the winners, you need to keep a record of the winners. This is equivalent to filling out the show report. You cannot always rely on the clerk’s records because the order in which the cultivars in a collection are written down may not be in the row order you want. And if you’re an experienced grower, you may be better able than the clerks to decipher the handwriting on the labels. It is more reliable if you record the flower names yourself so that you can supply the names that match the flowers in your photo.
Second is that after voting for Gold and other ribbons, winners don’t get put back in their original collections (if they came from a collection) and other candidates don’t always get put back in the right place or in the right collection. Local shows sometimes have local awards for best white, best pink, best American-bred, reserve champion, etc. This can leave a lot of holes in collections if all the winners are at the head table. There is a way to get non-winners back where they belong and to find out what was in a hole so that you can reassemble a collection before photographing it.
I have attached a PDF file that should be printed on Post-it 2100-J sheets of removable adhesive labels. I won’t go into the explanation, but if you use these labels as directed before taking a test tube out of a collection, you will be able to get everything back where it belongs and can identify the daffodils missing from their collections. You have to make sure the judges or clerks follow the procedure. This was done at Baltimore this year and Jackson last year and all the California shows. (I can explain why the information to fill in the labels is the absolute minimum needed if anyone wants to know.) It is important to use removable labels; you don’t want adhesive and bits of label left on the properties when taking down the show. Print and take a set of labels to your show and explain to your chairman of judges or chairman of clerks why they should use them.
Candidate_Labels.pdf
Let me affirm that Kirby’s system works like a charm. It has made a huge difference at NCDS shows. BRAVO Kirby, for devising a truly workable and reliable method for this otherwise difficult problem.
Melissa
Thanks for the label master. We will be use it in our upcoming show. BTW it will be this weekend. For those with the need for one last fix of daffodils, our show will be at Bachmans on Lyndale in Minneapolis on May 5 and 6. We are in late season here and we will have hundreds of flowers in the show. With our dry fall, several early season flowers are just now opening. I hope to take a few photos and will post them next week.
Many thanks to Ben and Tom both – great show coverage! Now if someone would just venture north to Minnesota this weekend! Ethel Smith