The  blog is about to celebrate its 11th birthday!

  The first post was on New Years Eve 2013 and  the numbers reading  have continued to grow apace with over 236,000 views  by 143,000 visitors over the course of the year,  just slightly  up on last year’s already record 224,000, the 100,000 for 2020 and less than 7,000 for the whole of 2014!  All adding up to a grand total of over 1.08 million views from 625,000 visitors

As always, thank you  for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep  telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list.  Just  go to the very bottom of any post, enter an email address and each new post  will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in time for breakfast. And now for the quiz….

But before we get to that you might like to know a few more facts and figures – and if not then just scroll down to this years questions…

Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is my 573rd post which in total scarily contain 1.35 million words,  with this year’s posts averaging around 2700 words each. Visitors come from virtually every country in the world [apart from a few in west/central Africa] although obviously most come from the UK, the USA and the rest of the English speaking world, with Europe following quite a way behind.

As you can see from the statistics above the all-time most popular one by far has been one  I wrote in 2021 on what I thought was rather niche, even by my standards, on electroculture which has had a total of over 89,000 views.  

You can see the most popular ones this year in the list on the left.

AND NOW THE QUIZ

There are 50 questions all from this year’s posts – hope that’s enough to keep you busy until 2025. The answers are at the bottom of the post but if you can’t wait then click on the links…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers:

 

1:   Guiseppe Archimboldo. 1527-1593

2:   Benington Lordship

3:   Casa del Rey, Moro [House of the Moorish King], Ronda, Spain 

4:   Eltham Palace

5:   Rafflesia

6:   Kew Orchid Festival

7:   Brutus and Rupert in my Garden

8:   Thomas Howard the Collector Earl of Arundel at Arundel House on the Strand in London

9:   The arrival of the first Europeans, a group of Portuguese traders, in Japan in 1543

10:  Cedric Morris

11:  John Cheere

12:  Wrest Park

13:  Piercefield

14:  Frances Hodgson Burnett 

15:  Ranelagh Gardens, now the site of the Chelsea Flower Show

16:  The grounds of Alexandra Palace

17:  Paul Cezanne

18:  Aquascaping

19:  The last remains of the aquarium at Crystal Palace

20:  Grimsthorpe Castle

21:  The site of the Garden of Eden

22:  Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka

23:  Hieronymus Bosch

24:  William Shenstone

25:  Orchid roots

26:  It is the original Bramley apple tree

27:  Frogmore

28:  Drummond Castle

29:  They are all Mrs Richmonds

30:  Alexander Pope

31:  In the grounds of Marble Hill

32:  Jupiter Artland

33: The  Water Gardens at Coombe Wood were part of the Veitch Nursery empire

34: Thorpeness

35:  Dr Erasmus Darwin  

36:  The Titan Arum is the largest flower in the world with the central spike standing  several  metres high

37:  The first image of Columbus arriving in the Americas in 1492,  being watched by King Ferdinand of Spain

38:  Section of the trunk of a sumach first included in Anatomy of Trunks, 1673, drawn using a microscope by Nehemiah Grew

39:  Melbourne Hall

40:  The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

41:  Chateau de Vendeuvre in Normandy.

42:  Van Gogh

43:  St Fiacre

44:  The Garden of Eden, as imagined by an artist in 12thc Constantinople

45:  John Parkinson

46:  William Gilpin

47:  William Kent sketched Alexander Pope working in his Grotto at Twickenham

48:  Marianne North

49:  A huge water storage tank that serves Thorpeness

50:  The Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar