Cover of a new edition of Madagascar –             more about the book below!

Let’s get the New Year off to a scary flying start with a look at monstrous even man-eating plants.  There have always been strange or mythical plants but from the second half of the 19thc they take on new and often terrifying forms, especially in fiction.

What caused this fascination with  hostile or mutant  plants ? The answer seems to be the pioneering scientific work about evolution by none other than Charles Darwin.   That might seem like a strange claim but read on to find out more…  and to discover why, even if unwittingly, Darwin started a whole new genre of plant-related fiction which started with the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar!   But everything is not always as it seems as you’ll see if you read on…

Sundew – Drosera 

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Tomorrow the blog celebrates its 10th birthday!

The first post was on New Years Eve 2013 and  the numbers reading  have continued to grow apace with over 222,000 views  over the course of the year,  well up on last year’s already record 152,000, the 100,000 for 2020 and less than 7,000 for the whole of 2014!  All adding up to a grand total of over 850,000. 

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….

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Over the past ten years I’ve done many of the obvious more glamorous Christmas-related plants so now it’s finally the turn of Brussels Sprouts to star in the  blog!

Poor old Brussels Sprouts. They’re a bit like Marmite: you either love them or loathe them. They’re the butt of almost endless jokes even though they’re a traditional part of Christmas. I say traditional  but in fact they’re a newcomer to the vegetable kingdom and have probably only been around for a couple of hundred years.

So what’s the story behind this often overcooked and under-loved Christmas stalwart?

What’s this? Answer at the end of the post.

Where does Zeus come into it?

Why was Charles Darwin so interested in them?

And obviously what, if anything, have sprouts got to do with Brussels?

But if you can’t face reading about sprouts why not check out some of the previous Christmas posts on Amaryllis; Mistletoe ; Ivy ; the Glastonbury Thorn ; Poinsettia ; or even artificial decorations ?

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A European Mole

Back in October I wrote a piece about how gardeners in the past dealt with garden pests Someone got in touch to ask why I hadn’t mention moles, [thanks  John!].  Apart from the fact I’d run out  of space in that post,  as one grows older I suspect one acquires a more zen approach to gardening. That’s certainly true for me and there are now very few creatures that I consider pestiferous enough to want to deter let alone eliminate – the coypu who are slowly destroying the banks of my lake, the newly arrived asiatic hornets who are threatening to kill off our bees, and maybe the polecats who play football in our roof-space and eat through the wiring – but  moles are definitely not  among them.

But I thought I’d investigate a bit further anyway…

from Mole’s in Love, David Bedford, 2009

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Ripley, just north of  Harrogate  is one of those picture postcard villages that according to Country Life “has been crowned North Yorkshire’s best village to live in.”   It was largely rebuilt in a picturesque Gothic style in the late 1820s by the local squire Sir William Ingleby of Ripley Castle which sits on the edge of the village and overlooks a beautiful lake and wide stretch of parkland.

From the outside, however, the castle doesn’t look to have much of a garden. In fact, hidden away behind its walls  it does and they contain some real surprises. I was lucky to visit a few days ago on a glorious late November day, with blue sky and very little wind and although the gardens were at the tail end of the season their quality shone through.

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