On location: behind the scenes of our Shop Front photo shoot

Myself and our regular photographer Sean Malyon met up in early March at one of our favourite locations to use as a backdrop garden setting for our shopping pages – Tyntesfield House – a National Trust property just 6 miles outside Bristol. The Tyntesfield estate was taken on by the National Trust in 2002, after the owner Lord Wraxall passed away with no direct heirs. The whole estate is an absolute treasure trove, but one of the areas that keeps us coming back is the beautiful walled kitchen garden, vast glasshouses and extensive potting sheds packed to the rafters with stacks of terracotta pots and vintage tools. There’s always something interesting to see, my particular favourite time is in late summer when the beds outside the glasshouses overflow with the most stunning displays of Dahlias.

I arrived with my car boot overflowing with beautiful and useful garden products for the April issue, this time our theme for the pages was ‘Birds & Bees’. We shoot these pages roughly a month ahead of the on-sale date of the magazine, so given the late start to spring this year we were very pleased to see the sun out and a bit more warmth than of late. I still wore my ski socks though!

We did a quick circuit of the kitchen garden to pinpoint where we thought we might shoot the first picture, and then set to unloading the contents of the car onto a trolley. Our first shot was of a decorative beehive storage box and some terracotta birdfeeders, which we decided to shoot beneath a lovely fruit tree with low branches. Here’s a picture of me fine-tuning the arrangement of the products:

Here’s my basket of styling goodies I take on each shoot (containing things like raffia, seed packets, blu-tak, string etc), and some seasonal cut flowers for another shot we did that day:

We must have been in tune with nature for our birds & bees theme – a friendly robin joined us in the sunshine for a time during our last shot of the day, he seemed quite interested in what we were doing, though I think on reflection it was my cheese and pickle sandwich he wanted! And the minute we brought out the vase of flowers, a butterfly landed on them and visited every single flower. It very much felt like the first spring day of the year.

To see the final results of our shoot and details of the products mentioned, look out for Shop Front in the April 2010 issue of Gardens Illustrated, on sale 25 March (UK).

_{Blog by deputy art editor Niki Earp}