Ah, How They Met: Toast by Fiona Gilsenan

Ah, How They Met:
The Utterly Delightful Toast

from the Unutterly Delightful

Fiona Gilsenan
(who was there when we met!)

I remember the exact moment that judy and Graham set eyes on one another.

It was, as you know, at the very apt venue of the 1997 Chelsea Flower Show. Nigel Colborn was doing a marvellous job of squiring us around Press Day, and we were meeting people left, right and center. It was all terribly exciting and novel, heightened by lack of sleep, jet lag, and the thrill of being at Chelsea on a glorious sunny day.

Suddenly this man walked into view carrying a large shopping bag and Nigel said something memorable like, "Oh there's Graham." Now you see the reason I remember it so well is because judy and I were thinking EXACTLY the same thing when we saw this man. As Jane Austen would say, he was tall and well-formed, and his very insousciant fringe was just slightly hanging over his eyes and he was wearing a very fetching casual denim shirt, just the picture of that slightly crumped English style that we North American girls go mad for. T

Through my psychic connection with judy, I could tell that she, like I, was thinking, "What a crumpet!"

Only my thoughts were by necessity tempered due to the imminent arrival of my husband. I have said to judy (and my husband, who doesn't really like to hear it) many times that we were saved a cat fight only by virtue of, well, my virtue.

(By the way, there is a digital photo documenting this moment on vg.com and while you're on there you may wish to read my seminal piece on slugs and snails. But I digress...)

It wasn't an entirely chance meeting. jude and I were in London to arrange a Web broadcast live from the show for the Virtual Garden, of which judy was Managing Editor and I was sort of Chief Hanger-On. As part of the coverage, jude had arranged to have some well-known (well, let's face it, REALLY famous) British garden writers who would participate in the coverage. Nigel was on board and her good friend Chris Bailes suggested that she contact Graham Rice.

Now Graham's books, as you know, are ENORMOUSLY successful in the states and so jude thought that a good suggestion, so she rang Graham a few times and left messages on his answerphone. No reply. But for some reason she persisted (how did she know that among the many things they have in common is the annoying tendency not to return messages???) and finally she reached him and they had a hard-hitting deal-making kind of conversation where she secured his participation, sight unseen.

So after this meeting at the show, we all met up again at this funky little basement cybercafe and overcame numerous technical problems to actually have a chat (where Graham SHAMELESSLY plugged his upcoming book on Annuals even though the chat was about Perennials). If Graham and Nigel had any doubts about the high-profile nature of Virtual Garden based on this dingy setting, they were too polite to reveal it and by this time, the sparks were starting to fly! It was sort of like, "YOU prefer Onopordum arabicum to O. acanthium? I do too! What a coincidence!"

After the chat we took a cab back to our hotel and I seem to remember judy and Graham were sort of squished together, which is a little suspicious when you think about the roomy architecture of a London taxicab.

We got back to our hotel and I was most impressed by the very confident and casual way that judy suggested to Graham he help himself to a sherry in the sitting room while she breezed off to freshen up before dinner at nearby Cafe Lazeez. My husband and I looked at each other and decided we had better leave them to their sag dansak. And the rest, as they always say, is history.

But I have to say that I wouldn't have stood a chance had we really been in competition. For judy is such a woman of such enormous and obvious gifts, and so clearly compatible with Graham, that he could not but help fall in love on the spot!

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