2022 – CHW

I thought I heard a cuckoo earlier this week but I definitely did in Old Park last night at the top of the wood undeterred by a post banger erecting the new pen above Kitchen Garden.

x Sorbonaria fallax ‘Likjornaja’ in bud still (Sorbus x Aronia). A peculiar bi-generic hybrid but not as dull or uninteresting as you might think in flower in a week or two. Bi-generic hybrids are scarce and unusual in nature.

2020 – CHW
I started writing these diary commends about COVID-19 as a personal way of trying to see and think through the reality of what was actually happening to the country and why. While I have read some newspapers and listened to the BBC bleating I have not paid any heed online to the conspiracy theorists or those who have more medical knowledge and knowledge of how the NHS and the mainstream media actually works.

One or two of those who have read my diary have put me in touch with Iain Davis’ paper on the “Coronavirus Lockdown and What You Are Not Being Told”.

Everyone who thinks about the collapse of our economy and why this has come about should read his two part article. You can do so here. Certainly it has elements of ‘conspiracy theory’ but is it really all ‘fake’ news? Decide for yourself!

Basically we have taken a political decision to shut down the country which was driven by the mainstream media acting in support of dubious science. The chief government scientific advisor, Professor Ferguson, is also in the pay of the pharmaceutical companies and the World Health Organisation which is half funded by Big Pharma. All have dubious track records with previous disease outbreaks.

The tidal wave of media demands for every country to lock down to save lives / the NHS etc was impossible for any democratic government not to accede to, despite Boris’ reluctance. Panic led fear as I have said often enough here (Sweden the exception).

But the NHS is NOT in crisis or even faintly overstretched. Far less people are actually dying of corona (rather than something else) than the figures purport to show. Death rates are about the same as a bad case of flu as the Spectator article surmised a month ago. They were right!

So why does the lockdown stay in place? Mainstream media hysteria has enabled the government to maintain lockdown unchallenged without any awkward ‘facts’ getting in the way.

We have dictatorship by default and a clear pathway for serious socialism when the economic disaster becomes the government’s fault (either way of course).

So who benefits from this surge to wreck our economy on the basis of false science? China? Big Pharma? Certainly not democracy and the British way of life as the BBC gleefully engage in its dismemberment.

Reading The Spectator and Private Eye this week even they dare not try to tell the objective truth because, presumably, they too are part of the mainstream media and dare not jump the fence.

An azalea in Rookery ‘sporting’ two very different colours. This is one of the still few left in the Rookery of the Wilson 50 collection. No idea of the name.

2016 – CHW

Sophora japonica ‘Sun King’ is full out at the greenhouse. We planted out three of these by the playhouse four to five years ago and all three are now dead from cold although one lasted a couple of years more than the others. No point really in planting this one out.

Good to see some of our tissue culture grown plants of long standing old favourites doing well.  Rhododendron broughtonii has a spreading creeping habit and has sat happily and unnoticed towards Green Gate for decades.  Now thanks to the work at Rosemoor by Ros Smith we have saved this hybrid for posterity and have several new clumps getting going.On our travels we bump into three more rather new and startling magnolias in full flower; two for the very first time.

Magnolia ‘Swedish Star’ looks from a distance to be a ‘Yellow Bird’ but, on closer inspection, it is a really good new addition to the yellows collection.  Time, yet again, to check the reference books.  It is greenish yellow with a good shape, opening flattish.

Magnolia ‘Woodsman’ x ‘Pink Surprise’ (unnamed hybrid).  This horror is a surprise alright and gets my vote as the most insipid and revolting ‘new’ magnolia colour yet.  You would not inflict it even on your mother-in-law.  Clearly an American product presumably as seed via the Magnolia Society International.

Magnolia ‘Green Bee’ is another Belgian from Philippe de Spoelberch which is good but not perhaps quite as good as ‘Lois’ or ‘Daphne’.  The latter is not even showing colour here yet but Lois will merit the camera in a couple of days.  ‘Green Bee’ does get into the current top 10 yellows but not quite the top 5.  However it may yet improve like ‘Yellow Lantern’.