2025 has been a very mixed year for the blog. As most of you will know, I changed the name at the very beginning of the year to help the Gardens Trust with the lengthy process of auditing of its digital content.

Unfortunately despite being repeatedly assured by the tech people that this wouldn’t really interfere with search engines finding previous posts, it has. As a result readership has fallen drastically. The total number of views for the year is  only 160,000 compared with 236,00 for last year – a daily average of 450 compared with 650. It’s taken numbers back to the level of 2022 but everything else is good  and I’ve got my fingers crossed that there will be a slow recovery during the coming year.

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…

This is my 620th post and together over the last 12 years they’ve included 1.35 million words and attracted a grand total of  over 1.25 million views from 724,000 visitors. Here are the viewing figures for the most popular posts for the year, and for the 12 years since I started.

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 now had a total of over 93,000 views.

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.

AND NOW THE QUIZ…

As usual there are 50 questions mostly from this year’s posts – hope that’s enough to keep you busy until 2026. The answers are at the bottom of the post but if you can’t wait then click on the links…

1.  What are these? And who made them?

2. Whose mausoleum is this? And where could you have found it?

3. Which famous garden designer lived here?

4. These are amongst the first western illustrations of which plant?

5. Where is this?

6. Whose plates were home to green frogs?

7. Where is this? Once home to the Duke of Marlborough it’s now home to which  university?

8.  What is going on here?        

9.Who was given a bunch of roses to take home to his wife after judging a flower show in the General Cathcart Inn in Nottingham?

10. Who went hunting for rhododendrons in Sikkim and the Himalayas?

11/ Who is this and why was she famous in her day?

12.Who published images like this in his Repository of the Arts, Literature and Fashion?

13 Who wrote The Gardener’s Dictionary?

14. Where would you find this Wild Man? And Why?

15 What kind of fungus is this?

16 Where would you find Anne Boleyn’s Orchard?

17.  Where is this?

18. Who ” At 12 o’clock, Saturday May 26th 1792″ took  “the Paddington Road, which the rains of last night had made nice riding, and the face of nature gay” and where were they going?

19 What was “the commodity that changed the world”? And who first grew it successfully in the British Empire?

20 Who are these women and what have  they got to do with Beverly Nicholls?

21. Where is this? 

22  Who discovered the Blue Orchid?

23 Who are these two?

24 Who drew these strange flowers?

25 Who invented this handy device?

26 Who wrote this poem?

27 Where’s this?

28 What’s going on here?

29. Who’s this?

30. What drink is this woman selling? And what’s it got to do with plants?

31 This woman founded one of the most famous gardens in North America but who is she?

32 Where is this?

33 who owned these gardens?

34  Who painted this?

35. What’s going on here?

36 Who is this and what is he doing and who was he doing it with?

37 Where is this plant-packed garden – and who did it belong to?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rest of the questions relate to  earlier posts which have still had a large number of views over the past year

38 Whats going on on here?  

39. Where is this supposed to be ?

40. Who is this? What are they trying to collect?

41. What plant is this?

42. What sort of garden is this? 

43. What’s this?  Whose collection was it in?

44. Where can you find this giant strawberry?

45.  Where is this?

46. This fort and nearby garden were the first European buildings in…?

47 Where was John Sales the former head of gardens at the National Trust, talking about when he said that  “in the development of gardening in the second half of the twentieth century no garden has yet had greater effect”

48. Where do these come from originally?

49. Who are the couple in this painting?

50.What has been labelled the ugliest plant in creation?

CONGRATULATIONS

IF YOU GOT THIS FAR!

& HERE ARE THE ANSWERS

1. Cyantotopes. By Anna Atkins
2. Princess Charlotte at Claremont
3. William Andrews Nesfield
4. Banana Plants
5. Queluz Palace, nr Lisbon
6. Catherine the Great
7. Whiteknights, Reading University
8. Picking mushrooms in the Paris catacombs
9. Samuel Reynolds Hole
10. Joseph Hooker
11. Anne Pratt, author of books about British Wild Flowers and Ferns
12. Rudolph Ackermann
13. Philip Miller
14. Belsay , The wild man features on the coat of arms of the Middleton family who owned the estate
15. Fly Agaric
16. Hever Castle
17. Studley Royal 
18. John Byng, later Viscount Torrington who was going to Yorkshire
19. Cinchona the source of quinine, William McIvor at Ooty
20. Nellie Melba and Constance Spry.  Nichollas asked Melba to sing a scale and she did so coming down a staircase decorated with huge floral arrangements by Spry.
21. Gunnersbury Park
22. Evelyn Cheesman
23. Rev Joseph Pemberton and his gardener Jack Benthall
24. Edward Lear
25. Heath Robinson
26. Reginal Arkell
27. Bethlem Hospital by Robt Hooke on the edge of Moorfields
28. Collecting mulberry leaves to feed silkworms
29. Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor
30. Saloop a drink made from orchid roots
31. Elsie Reford
32. Montreal Olympic Park & Botanic Gardens
33. Jacques Majorelle then Yves St Laurent & Pierre Berge
34. Annie Pressland 
35. Blue Plaque for Mr Middleton
36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau who went botanising with the Duchess of Portland
37. Edge Hall, Charles Wolley Dod
38. Early experiments in Electroculture of crops
39. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
40. Hercules trying to collect the Golden Apples of the Hesperides
41. Rafflesia arnoldii
42. Hortus Conclusus
43. A Dodo skull from the Tradecsant Collection
44. In The Garden of Earthly Delights a painting by Heironymous Bosch now in the Prado
45. The Garden of Eden, [American style by Thomas Cole 1828]
46. Cape Town
47. East Lambrook Manor, the home of Marjorie Fish
48. Central Asia inc Afghanistan etc and the mountains of Turkey/Caucasus
49. Vertumnus and Pomona
50. Welwitschia