A message of thanks from the Baggers committee to everyone who helped with the opening of the allotments for London Open Gardens 2025:
Thank you to all the volunteers who took time out to help in the cafe, talk to our visitors on the allotment and bake the most fabulous cakes, helping us make LOG another successful weekend.
All the LOG volunteers enjoyed their time with us and Marion Blair, our area coordinator sent a note of thanks and confirmed that despite the weather the City gardens had their highest visitor rate ever.
Just to let you know some statistics – despite the rain in all we had 463 visitors, Sunday morning being the busiest.
We sold all the postcards of Anna’s mother Betty’s paintings by 11.00 on Sunday morning and with the cafe and plant sales we made an overall profit of £540 which will go towards our allotment funds.
Thank you all again!
Sue
With thanks to Julia Skupny for the wonderful photos.
artworks by betty
In the photos above you can see the exhibition in the Sir Ralph Perring Centre of drawings, paintings and embroidered hanging. The accompanying biog of the artist, Betty, below plus images of the postcards (all sold out!):
Betty was born in a West Yorkshire mill town in 1930 and (unusually for that time) followed a career in architecture, one of a very few women in her year at Leeds School of Architecture.
She brought up four children on her own, sewing and knitting many of the family’s clothes. In her spare time (!?) she did evening courses in pottery and enjoyed needlepoint and embroidery; she made the bedspread hanging between the windows.
She was also a keen gardener and kept a large vegetable patch which fed the family with rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes, rhubarb, strawberries, beans and peas.
After she retired in the early 1990’s, Betty started classes in botanical painting, using her architect’s eye for composition and structure to create the paintings on display here.
Betty is mother and grandmother to one of our Golden Bagger families. When asked if we could display her paintings, in her usual self-deprecating way she said: ‘Well they’ll only be to throw away when I’m dead.’
She celebrates her 95th birthday this month.
