pumpkinstrokemarrow

Not so pleased to see that yet another rich MP (conservative as it happens) thought it appropriate to get even richer by stretching the rules for allowances, using them for nannies for his children (not allowed) rather than bath plugs (allowed). BH wondered what I expected. How did I think that he got rich in the first place? In this case, largely by rich daddy. But it remains true that the most generous people I have known have been poor people, not rich people.

Meanwhile, nearer home, pleased to announce that there is some kind of a gourmet fish fest with jazz to be held at Hastings 19-20 September. Maybe even worth a weekend away. And even nearer home, there is clearly some sort of a fest on at Epsom. Numbers of young women dressed very high wandering about the town at 1030. Maybe the local school of dance, drama and other performance arts is having a graduation. Maybe they will be in a bit of a state by the time we hit town around 1830, by which time they will have had getting on for 8 hours on the razzle.

Yesterday, to the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Turned up at 1445, 15 minutes before our half price, half day tickets kicked in. Blue badge did its usual helpful business of getting both us and our car to near the head of the two queues involved in getting in. Whereupon we found ourselves in what seemed like a cross between the Chessington Garden Centre and the Chessington World of Adventures. Lots of things to buy, most expensive and some consumable. Some alcohol, although not much use as most of us got there by driving. Lots of people wandering about, more than half female and more than half retired. Not quite the fashion statement of the Chelsea Flower Show, although they did try to make up with some catwalk stuff in a tent somewhere along the way. The noise of the day came from the natty little pull along boxes which people bought to put their purchases in, and which made a very distinctive rumbling, heard all over the show, as they trundled along the corrugated steel walkways. Not an unpleasant noise, but certainly distinctive. In contrast to FIL's rollator, which had rather bigger wheels and which made no noise at all. Maybe the crucial differance was that the boxes on wheels were made in China whereas the rollator was made in that home of precision and quality engineering, Germany.

The star of the day for me was the floral tent. Whacking great three bayed affair stuffed with really spiff floral displays. Quite sobering to think of the care and skill required to bring several hundred crysanthemums to show pitch on the same day, quite possibly out of season. And then still be in a condition to arrange them in a tasteful display. Although to be fair, a lot of the old style flashy flowers were simply massed in old style hemispherical groups. But even that would be well beyond my arranging skills. And then there were a lot of interesting displays involving lots of varities of a single species. But what surprised me was the high proportion, over half I should think, of exotic displays. So we had a lot of pitcher plants, orchids and bonsai. Other exotics from jungles, deserts, pre-history, South America and South Africa. All kinds of things which one might imagine would be well beyond the skill of your average amateur gardener. But presumably one would be wrong. These people would not spend the large sum involved in exhibiting if it did not generally pay. Overall rather stunned by the huge variety. Evolution, leveraged by nursery selection, has certainly done its stuff in generating variety.

One lady not so stunned though. I heard her explaining to her companion that all this orchid stuff was all very well, but once one had seen them at home, in their natural habitat, all this forcing in tents seemed a bit naff. But one stall holder got his own back, explaing to a colleague about the lady customer who came to him at his nursery with a very strange flowering pine story. It seems that a clematis had got mixed up in the pine tree and that she had convinced herself that the clematis flowers were springing from the pine. Was not going to be told. Amazing how one - and this is something that I do all the time - can cling on to the interesting or status-enhancing improbable in the face of the obvious.

Within the floral tent, I think the star for me was the bonsai, with a very flash arrangement of orchids coming second. I had forgotten how much I like bonsai, about which I acquired two factlets. First, when you have a cluster, each stalk of the cluster is an individual, not springing from a common root, like a sucker. Second, when you do interesting carving on the redundant parts of trunks of older trees bonsai'd later in life, you may paint the exposed wood with some sort of lime wash. This serves to provide decorative contrast and to inhibit decay. Now I don't want the bother of minding a bonsai myself, but must look into whether there is a fancy permanent display somewhere. Or do I have to go back to Washington DC, to drop a name, where they have a huge display of the most spiff bonsai that I have ever seen, by accident as it happens, in their national arboretum. Where, as it happens, the lady trustees were worrying about how to get to our very own Wisley on public transport. If I had been a bit quicker on the uptake (I plead consumption the day before) I would have invited them to visit us at Epsom, and then I could have taken them, but I did not think of that until afterwards.

For the BH, the star was the show gardens. The couple of dozen or so of small outdoor gardens knocked up by garden designers and others. A sort of large scale, outdoor flower arranging. All very clever, involving a lot of skill, flair and work in their own way, and certainly very popular, but not really my bag. I prefer the naturally artificial medium of bonsai to the fake natural of a show garden. Some of which, incidentally, were just plain silly, or even stupid. One had even been taking lessons from Dame Enim. She gets everywhere these days.