The Cheshire Gooseberry Project.
Cheshire Landscape Trust has been awarded £48,900 by the Heritage Lottery Fund for the Cheshire Gooseberry Project.
The project is:
- To work work with local rural communities, to record historic and current information about Gooseberry Society Shows.
- To collect and propogate gooseberry plants currently shown and establish reference collections at Tatton Park Walled Garden and Norton Priory Museum Trust Walled Garden.
- To work with schools in the villages where the shows still exist and create CD Roms to circulate to a wider audience.
- To take exhibits to horticultural shows in the area.
- To disseminate information to as wide an audience as possible.
There used to be 700 gooseberry shows throughout the country and 78 varieties of gooseberries.
The world record for growing the largest gooseberry is held by Kelvin Archer from Cheshire. His gooseberry weighed 61.88 grams.
I would like to find out more about gooseberry socieities. I have a Staffordshire pottery jug dated 1820 with name of Thomas Capper painted on it and also the name of a gooseberry Top Sawyer and its weight 26 dwts 17 grs. I think this was probably given to Thomas Capper as a prize from a gooseberry show. Can anyone help me.
Comment by Liz Bishop - September 25, 2007 1:56 pm
[…] were so popular in the nineteenth century that hundreds of gooseberry societies were formed. The Cheshire Gooseberry Project is researching these. The gooseberry shows of Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, […]
Pingback by Top Veg » Blog Archive » Capper's Top Sawyer Gooseberry - September 27, 2007 9:06 am
Liz
Thank you for your question. Intrigued we have done some research, and Thomas Capper seems to have grown a variety called Top Sawyer which produced the record berry! It is recorded in several books, as shown in the post http://topveg.com/2007/09/27/cappers-top-sawyer-gooseberry/
Comment by TopVeg - September 27, 2007 9:08 am