September 11th, 2017.


In its ninth year of opening for the annual Lewes District Artwave Festival, Geoff Stonebanks's award winning Driftwood Garden in Bishopstone pulled out all the stops once again. During the six day event, over three weekends, the venue saw a record breaking 1040 visitors.

One visitor, Marion Hanson Smith wrote: "Your garden is an amazing base for Artwave. We went to a few others and none came near in atmosphere or popularity."

A special prize awaited the 1000th 2017 visitor. Carole Sykes was the lucky person and she was awarded a £50 voucher to spend on some of the amazing 16 artists' work displayed throughout the garden. Carole chose a beautiful hand coiled pot by Polegate ceramicist, Amanda Haines.

The venue also sold over £12000 of goods throughout the festival. Macmillan Cancer Support also benefited to the tune of £2151 from the sale of tea and cakes, raffle tickets and donations.

Geoff said, "Visitors are so incredibly generous, and over the 3 weekends, we sold an astounding £1330 worth of tea and cake, that's a lot of home baked cake!"

The grand raffle of 16 beautiful pieces of art, donated by the participating artists was drawn by Director of Volunteering at Macmillan, Joelle Leader, while Chris Butland-Steed, star of Gogglebox, (who was one of the garden owners that opened for the Macmillan Trail earlier this year) looked on with one of his dachshunds.

Two raffle winners have already collected their prizes, Sheila from Seaford won three lovely rusty metal flowers, generously donated by Chris Burchell Collins and Roger Harris from the British Virgin Islands collected a framed print donated by Mark Glassman. The other 14 winners have been notified and hope to collect their prizes this week.

The garden gate has now closed until 2018.

Make sure you visit in 2018. Dates at www.driftwoodbysea.co.uk