Your author at Stowe in Oct last yr. Photo by Twigs Way

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.

A sneak preview of one of next year’s posts. Any idea what it’s going to be about?

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….

A  garden on the list for next year’s blog

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

A Christmas Cabbage

“The approach of Christmas time is already heralded by profuse displays, in every variety of design and colouring, of those cheerful cards which it has become so fashionable now-a-days to exchange between families and friends at the close of the year.” So began an article in the press   on 4th December 1880.

It went on…” of the entire host of card makers we must give the palm, alike for originality of invention, exquisite taste in design, and admirable finish in execution, to Mr Herman Rothe, 11 King Street, Covent Garden, London.”

I suspect it would be difficult to find anything showing more  “originality of invention”  than a set of bizarre humanised vegetables offering Christmas Greetings…although whether they show “exquisite taste in design” might be debatable!

A dandy of a beetroot and a well-dressed potato offering seasonal greetings – cards by Herman Rothe

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Wolley Dod’s Rose

Gardeners who are famous to one generation often don’t stay in the public memory of the next.  So while we still treasure Ellen Willmott, Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, one of their highly regarded contemporaries  has vanished from the face of horticulture history, although in his day, he was as esteemed as any of them. That’s probably because  he wrote no books.

If you’ve heard of Charles Wolley Dod then you’re either a fanatical reader of Victorian gardening magazines, or maybe a fanatical plant specialist who remembers a cultivar named after him or his garden or perhaps a member of Cheshire Gardens Trust… but if you have no idea who I’m talking about then why not read on and find out more about him…

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A more serious post than usual.

If you’re in the UK you’ll know that the government is looking to speed up the planning system which it says is one of the major obstacles to growth.

As part of that it is consulting on reforms to the system of statutory consultees.  These are organisations who play an important role in the planning application process by providing expert advice on significant environmental and heritage issues.  The Gardens Trust has been one of these consultees since 1995 and that means that local authorities have to consult the Trust on any planning applications that affect gardens and landscapes listed on Historic England’s Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

The government is proposing to take away or reduce that role, a move which will put parks and gardens at greater risk of damage so the Gardens Trust needs your support to try and convince ministers that their arguments are wrong…

It might sound technical but its really important, so please read on to find out more…

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The Majorelle Garden is a tranquil urban oasis in the busy city of Marrakech, in the south of Morocco. It was begun by the French artist Jacques Majorelle in 1924 inspired in part by traditional Moroccan garden design but  with some additional touches of his own. His combination of striking planting and a vividly strong colour palette – which includes the garden’s signature  colour- Marjorelle Blue – certainly disproves the old adage that “Blue and Green should never be seen”.

The garden was rescued from neglect and the threat of development in the 1980s by the fashion designer Yves St Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé, who carried out major improvements so that it now welcomes about 1.2 million visitors a year and is one of Morocco’s major tourist attractions.

If you read on you’ll see why…

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