Feeling judged

Or cracking out the special interview apron

After last week’s live chat with the Club re publicising your small business this piece feels ripe for the writing.

Interview outfit ready, featuring the special interview apron! Photograph pose ready? You decide!

Today I’m being interviewed for Gardens Illustrated. In my industry this is being interviewed by magazine top brass. Huge compliment. Will reassure my customers and club members (paid subscribers) of my standing in the world of horticulture. As a result I feel like a ten year old about to be examined by a very judgemental nun (I have strong memories of not doing well as a ten year old being examined by a judgemental nun who never liked me much despite the seven subsequent years she was headmistress of the convent school I attended in rural Essex.)

Worse, today I’m also being photographed, so that there’s a picture to go with this article. I know the photographer quite well. Jason Ingram is a talented fellow with many well-deserved plaudits to his name. He’s also, I know from experience, efficient, and achieves his objective without fuss or unnecessary time wasting - in short both good at his job, and good at getting his job done.

So I leapt out of bed this morning and rushed round watering and making the place look pretty. This is absurd. I’m being interviewed because I grow flowers for sale. Common Farm is not a show garden: it’s a working space designed to produce cut flowers not gasps at how beautiful it is. The idea is to have a space laid out so that I walk less distance, and can plant/weed/water/feed/harvest at speed. Whether the edges are tidy or watering cans lined up in a row carefully is irrelevant.

And so I stopped tidying up and got on with the watering.

Besides, the writer, Annie Gatti, has already been here a couple of times over the years, perhaps most notably last Friday when she turned up as expected, but I had an unexpected rush of flower harvesting on and couldn’t give her the time she had come for. Kind, patient, she allowed Fabrizio to give her a tour round the place, and so now she knows a lot about the Adder’s Tongue Fern in the wild flower meadow and that I can be occasionally relied upon to supply my clients while letting a journalist down.

And so to today. I’m nervous because of the debacle of last Friday. And I don’t like having my photograph taken. I don’t mind taking my own photograph as a selfie - I can control how much gurning, whether my blue eye looks dramatically smaller than my brown, how much of my odd coloured and increasingly snaggled teeth show, and so on. I’m photographing for my own social media and so I just wear what I wear and look how I look. Standing still for a photographer is to allow someone to take a picture of how they and by extension other people see one - not always a comfortable view for the photographed. Equally, being interviewed by a pro like Annie means she can notice what she will about the place, judge me as ruthlessly as any disapproving nun. Like the photographs you see of me the writing about me is usually written by me and so while I try to be straightforward and am always honest I can edit to make a vision or a version of a person I don’t mind being around.

And so the self consciousness of being interviewed and photographed. I’ve ironed a favourite white shirt that I bought when I took my daughter to Paris for her twelfth birthday after covid had stopped us going for her tenth. I’m wearing the good slop that I wear every day - but I’ve washed it. Clean jeans are tight and a bit short as a result, but the dirty are too far gone for Jason’s camera. Self-consicous thoughts about trainers versus boots: but I love my into-their-fourth-year-of-wearing white M&S trainers with silver stars on the sides and so will wear them even if they do make me look like one of those ladies who don’t really do the job they say they do as full time as they claim. Besides, they’re comfortable for driving and I’m off to Yeo Valley for the photography.

Over all, I will be wearing a Common Farm Flowers apron, brand new, made by my neighbour Helen’s workers at Made by Thimble. She has a small manufacturing business in the yard behind her house - they are dairy farmers - across the field from us. Never go anywhere without your brand on your breast somebody said to me once and however much I gurn into the camera or the odd colours in my snaggled teeth are caught by the sharp spring sunlight, Common Farm Flowers will be clear in the image and the point of being interviewed will have been upheld.

I hope I’m an interesting enough gardener and small business woman for Gardens Illustrated to talk about. But at all times I will remember that I’m there because I’m trying to earn a living and so brand awareness above all. The garden can be untidy, people can judge my footwear and the frill on my blouse. But they’ll see the branding and hopefully remember that I’m the person to come to for learning how to grow, cut, arrange and sell flowers, for mentoring for their small business, and for their wedding flowers, so long as I’m still in the business of making a living growing cut flowers for pleasure and profit.

Due to my disorganisation on Friday, and a calendar which is extra rammed at the moment thanks to incoming Chelsea Flower Show with the Farewell Flowers Collective and the compliment of being made joint external chair of Flowers from the Farm, poor old Jason has only half an hour to take the photograph. Good luck Jason (edit - he nailed it by the way.)

And Annie will have to take us as she finds us. My flower farm is not my showroom, it is my workplace. I made a lovely bunch of flowers during the online Cutting and Conditioning demo I taught last evening, and I’ll put them on the table outside the studio while I offer Annie tea from a pot - we do uphold SOME standards at all times - even if the pot spout is chipped, it is a Marriage Freres pot I was given for my fiftieth birthday eight years ago and so I’m very fond of it (edit - we drank coffee, and I forgot to style the interview with the bouquet of flowers.)

The arrangement made during the Cutting and Conditioning Demo - now available to buy as a recording if you missed it

Right, I’m off to Yeo Valley. Have a good day all.

Ten Tips for being interviewed