Wild about watercress From skincare to cocktails, watercress is more than just a salad ingredient. It even has its own festival, now in its 20th year, discovers Maddy Fletcher By Maddy Fletcher For You Magazine Published: 07:00 EDT, 15 June 2024 | Updated: 07:00 EDT, 15 June 2024 e-mail View comments Tom Amery always has watercress in his fridge. He eats the plant every day, as do his wife and two teenage sons.
This makes sense. Amery, 47, is the managing director of The Watercress Company, the UK’s largest grower. The business has 50 acres of watercress beds across Hampshire and Dorset and can harvest 600 tonnes of it each year.
(Watercress grows well in Hampshire and Dorset because the soil there is especially rich in mineral water.) In 2004, Amery also helped found The Watercress Festival: an annual event in a Hampshire village called Alresford. The festival celebrates – and there are absolutely no prizes for guessing this – watercress.
It’s held on a Sunday in May, at the start of the watercress season, which runs until November. The festival grew by word of mouth, says Amery. In the first year only a few hundred people turned up from the local villages; within five years there were about 6,000 attendees.
This year – the 20th anniversary – there were 18,000 people present. The ‘word of mouth’ thing is true. When I heard about the festival earlier this year, I texted my boyfriend asking if he wanted to go with me.
He is 32, lives nowhere near Hampshire and .