Chelsea Flower Show

When I was an apprentice gardener back in the 60s, working for Ealing Parks Department, we were expected to go to Chelsea Show every year, but as that involved being driven there in his car by the Parks Superintendant, it wasn’t such a great hardship. We got in free and spent the day being shown round by him. I never actually had to pay to visit Chelsea Show because when the Superintendant stopped taking us I stopped going.

My sister, who wasn’t employed by the Parks Department, used to go to Chelsea Show regularly and used to have to pay. She gave up doing that several years ago because she said it had got too expensive. Mind, in the days when she did use to go to the show, she could have bought a copy of my book on plant religions and mythology, Gardens of the Gods, still available from Amazon, which the RHS used to sell at Chelsea Show when it was first published.

The BBC seem to set a lot of store by Chelsea Flower Show, sending all sorts of odd people to visit and report on it. Malvern Show as well, to which they do at least send gardening types like Monty Don and Joe Swift to report on events.

I don’t watch any of their coverage, I’m afraid, preferring to be out in my own garden when the weather allows, and it has done recently, surrounded by red hot pokers, day lilies, laburnum and azaleas at the moment to name but a few.

I haven’t got to the state of mind of my grandmother, who wouldn’t go away on holiday anywhere because it meant missing something growing in her garden giving of its best at that moment, but I can see why she got like that.

Wales in the days before time

Free from Amazon Kindle on Saturday 20th April and Sunday 21st April!

 Download your copy to read over Easter whilst you're enjoying your eggs and hot cross buns!

 Your chance to read The Unintentional Time Travellers Guide to Other Worlds and Other Dimensions, by Brian W Taylor, set in a  Wales in the days before time and before it was ever known by that name. A Wales where elves, sprites and fairies live alongside mortals and where people are fighting to free themselves from the sorceress whose fire ice jewels, mined in the depths of the mountains there, can control the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them. A war which has been simmering for centuries.

The person the story centres on, very reluctantly ventured through the time portal at the end of their garden to try to find someone who’d gone through it deliberately and bring her back before she came to any harm and before the war which was only simmering before broke out again. It’s too late for that now, though. They’ve found that the war is in full spate.

How easy is it going to be to find the missing person they’ve gone through the time portal in pursuit of? And how easy is it going to be to escape with her back through the time portal without either of them becoming casualties of war?

                                                               

A new title by Brian W Taylor

A man digging up the flowerbeds in search of the golden cockerel he believed had been buried in them by a writer trying to promote his latest book; a boy passing himself off as a girl, knowing that the obligatory staff medical he would have to go through soon if he wanted to keep his job, would lay bare his secret to a sniggering world; a woman who had found love late in life and now wondered if she should be doing the things her new lover was asking her to do in the park during her lunchtimes; police officers in the park pursuing a flasher the local press had made into a rapist in order to sell more copies of their newspaper; a reorganised parks department in which newly appointed office staff, many of them promoted beyond their comfort zone, were jockeying for position; a local councillor forced to endure a commemoration of his twenty-five years of service he didn’t want.

A tree planting ceremony held in the park one summer’s day in 1983, to mark that twenty five years of service, wasn’t supposed to end with one of the people involved losing their job, and another losing their life, but as events turned out, they did. Doing It In The Park - a new title by Brian W Taylor

During the 1960s 70s and 80s I worked for several different local authorities in London, and in a lot of different parks as apprentice, gardener, and then supervisor. Not all of my fellow workers had set out to follow a career in horticulture, some were failed actors, some were would-be artists, working in the parks during the summer months to earn enough money to be able to spend the winter months painting, some were rehabilitating criminals who had served their time, some were society's misfits, people who just couldn't find a more suitable niche for themselves anywhere else, some were just doing the job until something better came along - except that sometimes it never did. Some were just there to take advantage of the security of a job for life on the council, which was one of the perks in those days.
Job security, indeed the job itself, disappeared during the years when Mrs Thatcher ran the country, and you won't find parks or their staff like those depicted in my book anymore. Some might say that's as good thing, but I think it's a pity that that way of life has gone.
The people and events depicted in the book, those which really happened, are taken from several of the parks in which I worked and added to those which are purely fiction to make a story, the ones which are pure fiction are simply that. I hope they all gel together to make a story people will enjoy. It always makes me nostalgic for those times when I read the story again, and I do from time to time, because I enjoy it.

Murder By Default - Making Default Choices

                                                 

Default options are pre-set courses of action that take effect if nothing is specified by the decision maker. In computing the default option is the option offered by a system, which will always be followed except when explicitly altered.



In life the default option is the choice of action or mode of behaviour that will always be followed except when a different choice is made. For women, smiling is the default option. For men, the default is not smiling.



In a choice context, a default refers to that option which choosers end up with if they do not make an active choice. This notion is similar to the one in computer science where defaults are settings or values that are automatically assigned outside of user intervention. Setting the default affects how likely people end up with an option. This is called the default effect. More precisely, it refers to changes in the probability that an agent chooses a particular option when it is set as a default as opposed to the situation where this option has not been set as default. For example, different countries have different rules on how to become an organ donor. In countries with the opt-in policy, all citizens are automatically considered as non-donors unless they actively register as donors. In countries with the opt-out policy, all citizens are automatically considered as donors unless they actively seek to be struck from the register. It has been argued that this difference in policy is the main cause of the significant difference in donor rates across the respective countries.



Some default effects are implied by the situation. In social settings, for example, the normative choice (what others are doing) may be adopted unconsciously as a social default effect. People are thus more likely to choose what they observe others choosing, even if they do not believe that other person is the more knowledgeable person. People are also more likely to treat choices that require less justification as defaults. The default option for parole hearings, for example, is to deny prisoners parole.



In the world of Chief Inspector Macdonald and Sinead Grogan, when someone has been murdered the default option is 'man kills man over a woman', or 'man kills woman over another man'. This is true even if no body has been found as yet.

                              

Westeros v Middle Earth v The Five Kingdoms

The best fantasy worlds need to feel real while still providing readers with their fill of the fantastical. They need to be unique and not at all derivative. And they need to be fully fleshed out so it feels like the characters are moving between real world locations across open areas which seem vast and give a good sense of distance while cities should feel cramped and populated and not at all like their country-set counterparts.

The amount of detail given about a world is also important. It should feel incredibly real, even when we are reading about dragons and shadow assassins. Characters in Westeros in The Game of Thrones talk about where they need to go or who controls what lands so naturally and vividly it’s as if they are talking about real places. A Song of Ice and Fire is a perfect example of how a writer can create a fantasy world without it being cliche or derivative.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, however, is the fantasy world by which all other fantasy worlds are judged. Almost everything Tolkien ever wrote took place, in one way or another, in Middle-earth. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series give a good idea of just how detailed a fantasy world can be. Everyone has a family tree in Middle-earth and every place has a detailed history.

The Five Kingdoms, the other dimension to where the time travelers are taken in The Reluctant Time Travelers Guide to Other Worlds and Other Dimensions, has a similar detailed history as one of the characters in the story explains to another character.

Best described, as an alternative Wales, the first character says, with the borderlands around it being like the Welsh Marches. Very like twenty- first century earth, in some ways, and yet very unlike them in others, because in The Five Kingdoms elves and sprites and fairies still live alongside mortals, like they used to on earth in days gone by. And there are Sorcerers too!

One area of The Five Kingdoms in particular, a land of extremes where the burning desert of Myrrhia meets the icy wastes of Cyonil and the overwhelming heat of day is matched only by the icy cold of the nights, is ruled by a queen called Setura, who appeared there suddenly, and without warning, in the dim and distant past, and just took it away from the people who had been living there before she came. No one really knew where she had come from, or even when it was she first began to gather her army about her, because once she was there, no one dared venture into that land again. And those who had been there when she first came were never free enough afterwards to leave and tell the rest of the world about it.

This was the forbidding land into which Aurora Bradley had blundered because she refused to believe it could exist, and from where she spent the rest of the story trying to escape.

The Reluctant Time Travellers Guide To Other Worlds And Other Dimensions, a new e-book by Brian W Taylor, the first part of a trilogy, will be free on Amazon Kindle on 28th and 29th October. Don't miss your chance to own a copy.

                                                               

Pond Plants You'd Rather Not Have

A damp and dark day in Shropshire and though the threatened worst excesses of the unfortunately named, ‘Storm Brian’, have yet to strike us, it’s still raining heavily enough to prevent me working outside.

I had been working in my pond, pulling out the Australian Swamp Stonecrop ( Crassula helmsii) which came from who knows where to set up home with us a couple of years ago, and liked the situation so much it now needs two sessions a year of me pulling it out to keep it under control.

The only weed the pond is supposed to be home to is Curly Waterweed (Lagarosiphon major), which we put in as an oxygenator when we first made the pond twenty or so years ago and which, being less thuggish by nature than its neighbour, continues to float about on the surface of the water in clumps about the same size as those we introduced.

Australian Swamp Stonecrop was introduced to Britain from Tasmania in 1911, was first sold as an oxygenating plant in 1927, by Perry’s Hardy Plant Farm in Enfield, and was first recorded as growing in the wild in a pond at Greenstead Farm in Essex in 1956.

The plant first appeared in our pond as a small light green tussock which had attached itself to the surface of a pot with a plant in it growing just above the waterline and then grew out rapidly to form a dense mass of vegetation. Bits of that vegetation then broke away from the parent plant when I tried to remove it and rooted into other plants in the pond. That is how it has continued to spread around the pond.

Australian Swamp Stonecrop eliminates native flora by out-competing with it. It is shade tolerant, frost tolerant, desiccation tolerant and has no dormant season. The only ways of controlling it at all seem to be to cover small patches of it with black plastic or carpet, or spraying it with formulations of Glyphosate specific to aquatic environments.

In the garden, on a bank above the pond, perhaps, look out for the deep rose pink flowers, spreading habit and vigorous growth of Erica carnea  ‘December Red’, the Winter Heath, adding brightness to our lives in the depths of winter