Happy Christmas!

It’s also two years since I started writing this blog, and I seem to have settled into a comfortable pattern of posting early on Saturday mornings. Some readers have obviously got used to that because I’ve had emails, if for any reason I’m a bit later than 9.00, enquiring what’s happened to their weekly garden history fix!  So the fact that its Boxing Day would not be considered an excuse for missing a week or even for being a minute or two late. 

Although there are only 105 ‘followers’ who receive each post in their email, readership is now running at around 500 a week with occasional spikes when a post gets picked up and circulated by other groups on Facebook or Twitter etc.  Overall readership for 2015 should reach 25,000 ‘hits’ by the end of the year  [its 24,707 as I write] – compared with 6,900 for 2014.  That’s from just over 10,000 visitors compared with 2,890 in 2014.     So thank you to everyone who has been reading the posts, telling their friends and passing the blog on.  Please keep up the enthusiasm and the comments.

And now, in the post-Christmas lull, you can test your memory of things the blog has covered this year…

As in last year’s quiz there are 50 questions, and the answers are at the very bottom of the page.  Good luck!

WHERE IS THIS?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHO IS THIS?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT IS THIS?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHO….

1. banked at the sign of the Marygold and built a ‘palace’ near London?
2. was responsible for a hedge that easily becomes anti-social?
3. was embarrassed to accept roses for ‘the missus’?
4. invented the wheelbarrow?
5. was “an agreeable, pleasant companion, as well as a great genius in his profession”?
6. “absolutely reeked of experience [&] had sap in his veins”?
7. advised his readers to “have a couple of cocktails” before they went to the nursery to buy plants?
8. was “the smallest clever man” that Ruskin “ever knew”?
9. is Paulownia named after?
10. was united by flowers but then divided by love?
11. stole the geraniums?
12. became fabulously rich because of an “an act of insanity“?
13. thought “the waste of sewage is a national calamity…”?
14. is remembered as ” a striking vermillion and gold stripey rose”?
15. designed Northumberlandia?
16. was Aunt T?
17. sold tulips for a penny each & crocus at 3 for a penny?
18. sent sweet pea seeds to Enfield in 1697?
19. taught both Queen Adelaide and Queen Victoria botanical drawing?
20. was Richard Holt?

 

ANSWERS…..

Where is it?

1. The chattri or Entrance pavilion at the Muslim Burial Ground, Horsell Common, Surrey.  2. The Stumpery at Highgrove  3. Standen  4. Merlin’s Mount, Marlborough, Wilts  5.  Killerton  6. Queen Caroline’s revolving summer house, Kensington Gardens  7. Mrs Lawrence’s villa, West Drayton  8. Ichaboe  9. Leighton Hall, nr Welshpool, Montgomeryshire.  10.  Rievaulx Terrace

Who is it?

1. Thomas Hill   2. Rev Henry D’Ombrain and his family  3. Edward Lear  4. Andre Le Notre [but only as portrayed by Matthais Schoenaerts in A Little Chaos]   5. Nobody knows for certain, but legend has it that its John Rose, gardener to Charles II  6. Louisa Lawrence  7.  Percy Thrower  8.  Beverley Nicholls  9. Ivor Abrahams  10. Canon Reynolds Hole

What is this?

1. The Bee Shelter at Hartpury in Gloucestershire  2. Manypeeplia upsidownia
from Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany  3.  Coprolites or fossilized dinosaur poo  4. A leylandii seedling  5. Paulownia buds  6. The first European image of a pineapple  7. Patented supports for exhibiting roses  8.  Rochford’s improved boiler  9.  The 30-strong outside broadcast camera crew at Percy Thrower’s house   10. Male and female mistletoe flowers.

Who…

Sir Francis Child  2.  Christopher Leyland  3.  Canon Reynolds Hole  4. no-one knows but tradition says it was Zhuge Liang  [sometimes Chu Ko Liang] Chief Minister of Shu  5. Capability Brown according to Mrs Montagu   6.  Percy Thrower according to Alan Titchmarsh  7.  Beverley Nicholls  8. Edward Cooke  9. Princess Anna Pavlovna, the daughter of Tsar Paul I, &  later Queen of the Netherlands.  10. The Hatton and Lambert families  11. Nobody knows… but Charles Fairfield was tried and acquitted   12.  William Gibbs  13.  Shirley Hibberd   14.  Harry Wheatcroft  15. Charles Jencks  16. Theresa Villiers (Mrs C.W. Earle)  17.  Woolworths in the 1930s  18.  Father Francisco Cupani  19. Augusta Withers  20. The first patentee of artificial stone.