IT'S only two weeks to go before the starter gun fires on the garden build for the Spring Gardening Show.

On April 14, designers, contractors and lorryloads of hard landscaping, features and plants will all begin to converge on the Three Counties Showground.

We will all then have twenty-one days to turn our own patch of rough turf into a little paradise to impress the judges and bring joy to all the visitors.

My preparations are progressing slowly but surely. I have ordered around 80 iris plants in four varieties from Howard Nurseries which I’m hoping will look really majestic in the garden – that is if Christine Howard can get them all into flower for me for the Show, as she has promised to try to do!

I’ve also reserved lots of grasses at local nurseries, including stipa tenuissima, which should be in frothy with feathery panicles. Some spring grasses have unfortunately already had the chop for the crime of not being sold to garden centres earlier in the year. However, I am assured that, with good weather, they will put on enough growth again in time for the show. I can see that a great deal of my time in the next month will be spent on my knees praying for sunshine.

And that brings me neatly to my next subject. Did you know that today is the feast day of St Truggewit, the patron saint of kitchen gardens? He was a very resourceful and pioneering early monastic gardener who invented and, of course, gave his name to that indispensable piece of gardening equipment now familiarly known as a ‘trug’.

The chronicles tell us that he was renowned for insisting that the young novices at his Cistercian foundation should eat a side dish of raw ‘salat’ leaves with their daily potage. However, as is the way of youth, not all his charges were appreciative of his care for their health and when one of them, Peter de Donnewitch, later rose to be prior legend has it that he banished the now elderly Brother Truggewit to a hermitage as a penance for his overweening horticultural arrogance. But, of course, St Trug could not keep his hands out of the good earth and there dispensed his healing ‘hearbes’ to the local peasantry in need. He lived to a ripe old age for his time and was buried with his favourite trug at his feet. His grave at Beaulieu Abbey became a place of pilgrimage for all those suffering with digestive disorders and extreme flatulence.

His cult grew and it is recorded in his hagiography that the bones in his open coffin glowed green during particularly fine gardening weather. Alas, his shrine is no more since that great lover of other peoples gardens, palaces and abbeys, Henry VIII, dissolved his foundation.

But his memory is still honoured by kitchen gardeners everywhere who continue to use their ‘truggewits’ to this day.