The Petersham Garden Centre offers a visiting experience as far from the corporate style mass-produced garden product range as it is possible to imagine. The plants (all for sale) are arranged in an assembly of riotous growth and colour that is reminiscent of a fairy-tale Cottage garden. The teashop is packed with delicious squashy cakes, genuinely home-made, and served with lashings of cream and icing. The luncheon-room meals are booked weeks in advance, so good and of such quality and of so delicious a range of tastes do they comprise, that words fail to do justice.
Go there and see for yourself.

I should be grateful that there is a Farmers' Market at all within cycling distance of my home. Yet it is irritating to feel taken for a bit of a ride (no pun intended).
1. Firstly, the Isle of Wight tomatoes look like, smell like and taste like any other supermarket Isle of Wight tomato yet they are more expensive; surely that is a contradiction in terms. The youthful foreign sellers of these tomatoes (different every week) tell me that they ferry over to the Island, load up their vans early in the morning, cross over back again, and truck them into WimPark Farmers Market ... these people are business entrepreneurs and all power to them, but they are not the farmers with excess farmgate produce that I expect. Perhaps I am just naive.
2. Almost no produce sold at Wimbledon Park Farmers' Market is organic and what there is, is seldom Soil Association certified. "Too expensive to obtain certification," the apple juice man responds, when I ask him why not. "My vegetables are actually grown, without pesticides, just like organic ones but the paperwork is too time-consuming," says the veg lady.
3. Another peeve is the total refusal to sell anything until 8:30am, even though the sellers are all set up and ready to start far earlier. The reason is apparently not to annoy the local residents. Yet surely the arrival of the sellers' vehicles, parking, unloading and setting up must annoy the residents as much as the simple exchange of money for produce.
4. The honey man comes every other Saturday and his honey is good, but an additional benefit is his delight in talking about bee keeping when he is not too busy.
5. The dairy seller, a Bulgarian, last time I was there, offers excellent keshkaval cheese and buffalo milk yoghurt in glass pots which is a nice change from the plastic supermarket yoghurt containers.
5. Being a vegetarian, I cannot rate the meat and the fish produce.
6. I find it rather odd that fresh cut flowers are on sale at a Farmers' Market but perhaps the flowers one grows oneself are just inadequate: not colourful or showy or varied enough.
7. The cake lady says she really does bake herself all her decoratively iced cakes, muffins and cookies; certainly they taste good.
8. There are no biodynamic products at all.
9. There are usually two competing sellers of bread which permits a vast choice of excellent loaves, croissants, rolls and cheesey things.
To sum up, there are plenty of things to buy and plenty of buyers too. Perhaps I am just a purist not to be more appreciative of what is on offer; I just expect a farmer's market to have farmers in it, I suppose.