HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Welcome to the 10th year of the blog.  The numbers reading  have continued to grow apace with about 152,000 hits over the course of the year,  well up on last year’s already record 129,000, 100,000 in 2020 and less than 7,000 in 2014!

The average daily viewing have been well over 350 over the whole year and for a couple of months reached over 500.  There were even 453 views on Christmas Day itself.  

There have been about  93,000 visitors, up from 75,000 last year, 56,000 in 2020 and 26,000 for 2019.

Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is the 468th post which in total scarily contain just over million words,  with posts averaging around 2600 words each. 

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 and  enter an email address and each new post  will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in good time for breakfast.

And now read on to test your memory with the  annual quiz based on this year’s posts.

 

But before we get there a few more facts and figures!

In terms of popularity it helps enormously if a post is  noticed and circulated via social media or other websites.  So please spread the word! That was proved in spades by the sudden popularity of a post I wrote back in September 2021.  Electroculture was, I thought, a pretty niche subject and it got about the average weekly view before  suddenly in June this year it go picked up by someone with a specialist interest. I don’t know who/where or why but it was widely circulated and since then it has been read  was read over 13,000 times, making it the most popular thing I’ve ever written by a long long way.   Also popular for similar reasons were  posts about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh which have resonated with religious websites.  

As you can see from the table on the left which shows the all time number of viewing since I started the blog in 2013.  Electroculture is followed by a group of  “old favourites” including Stumperies [May 2015] Carters [Oct 2016], Night Soil [July 2015] Harry Wheatcroft [July 2015] and those about   Frank Crisp’s Crackerbox Palace at Friar Park [May 2019],  Paulownias [May 2015] and Beatrice Parsons [Nov 2014]. 

Since the blog started at in  2013 there have been a grand total of about 628,000   views by over 335,000 visitors.

The  percentage of UK viewers this year has dropped back to just 46%, with a substantial  international audience, mainly from the USA  with 24%, and with Australia and Canada on about 3% each followed by a host of European countries. As last year the reach was pretty near global, with  just Afghanistan, Cuba and a few countries in west and central Africa where the blog has had no viewers.

And now just what you’ve all been waiting for – the annual quiz to test your powers of recall from posts over the course of the year.  If in doubt just clink on the link to be taken to the right page,  or cheat and head straight to the end where you’ll find all the answers.

As usual there are 50 questions…

************* WHO IS THIS? ***************

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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WHAT IS THIS?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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WHERE IS THIS?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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And finally 20 Questions…..

1.  Who or what is Lazy Maisie and Pingle-Wingle?

2. Where was the first Chelsea Stadium?

3. Where did King Kassapa built his garden?

4. What was Mary Lawrence passionate about?

5. Who was “the doyenne of the lazy approach” & owned a pig called Mr Mountjoy?

6. Who lived at Holmwood –  Then and Now?

7. What’s on top of Moel Fameu?

8. Where was the first floral clock in Britain?

9. What grows in Bénédicte de Foucaud’s Noah’s Ark?

10. Where was Britain’s Tomato Capital ?  

11. Where was the country’s  only Tomato Museum?

12. Which gardener and garden writer worked  at Abercairney, Taymouth, Stratton Park, the Colosseum Regiment Park, Claremont, Laeken and finally Dalkeith 

13. What did John Haws invent?

14. What and where is Imperator Dashwoodus Rex  & what’s it made of?

15. Where can you find The Carpet Gardens?

16. Who is supposed to have invented secateurs

17 Where can you find Julian’s Bower?

18 Which monk “didn’t learn about this from people’s chatter, or from looking at a lot of old books, or spending long days doing nothing”

19. Which garden painter lived at Nackington?

20. What’s the world’s most global food crop? 

 

ANSWERS

Who is this?

1. The Sperling Family from Dynes Hall in Essex
2. Karen Roos founder of  Babylonstoren
3. Eleanor Vere Boyle, garden writer
4. Sir Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe
5. Ethelind Fearon, garden writer
6. Elsie, one of the two girls who “saw” the Cottingly Fairies
7. Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, garden painter
8. Charles McIntosh [or M’Intosh], head gardener
9. Geoffrey Bawa, architect and garden maker
10. Annette Ashberry, maker of miniature gardens

What is this?

1. Applause, introduced by Suntory as the nearest thing to a Blue Rose
2. The Snaptun Stone [a carving of  an early gnome??}
3. “A Confocal micrograph of a section” of the stem of Bindweed
4. One of the few surviving onion sheds in Bedfordshire, now in a ruinous state
5. Looking down on the mosaic pattern of the Target Garden at Brodsworth
6. The seed capsules of a peony
7. A Tudor thumb-pot 
8. The Dorey Patent Soil Steriliser on a tomato farm on Guernsey
9. A sunflower clock devised by Athanasius Kircher
10. The wall of the Beddington Orangery

Where’s this

1. The pagoda and dance floor at Cremorne Gardens
2. The grotto at Fontainebleau
3. The ruined orangery at Gibside
4. The garden laid out for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee at Newark castle
5. The Jubilee Celebrations for George III at Frogmore
6. Brodsworth 
7. The entrance to Bevis Bawa’s garden “The Brief” in Sri Lanka
8. Harlaxton
9. Prince Albert Gardens, Swanage
10. Kingston Lacy

Twenty Questions

1. Bindweed
2. Cremorne House
3. At Lion Rock, Sigiriya, Sri Lanka
4. Roses and Passion Flowers – she painted & published images of both [Roses from 2019]
5. Ethelind Fearon
6. Then: Admiral Mark Kerr  and more recently Gerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch
7. The remains of an obelisk/tower put up for the Jubilee of George III
8. Princes Gardens, Edinburgh
9. Peonies
10. Worthing
11. Guernsey
12. Charles M’Intosh
13. A watering can
14. A fibreglass equestrian statue of a roman Emperor, originally a film prop, on a hill overlooking West Wycombe
15. Eastbourne
16. Antoine-Francois Bertrand, Marquis de Molleville
17. Alkborough in north Lincolnshire
18. Walafrid Strabo
19. Margaret Waterfield
20. Onions