1. Prince Harry has been baking cakes for Sentabale in Maseru, Lesotho. Will he do the same at Chelsea Flower Show? No, but he will be there on 20 May. Also at the show will be Zara Phillips, cutting a cake for John Deere tractors’ 50th. And the Queen. Hazza effect made tix sell out/touts bump up prices quick.
2. Other Chelsea gossip. Hortus Loci and Crocus are friends again. Tim Penrose from Bowden Hostas is possibly the biggest character in the marquee if you’re looking for someone who will chat. There aren’t many overseas trees in the show gardens, honest. Ash are banned. James Wong was doing a show garden but now he isn’t. Best bank background, East Village garden designer Marie Agius is daughter of Marcus Agius and grand daughter of Edmund de Rothschild. Judging: this year’s gardens will be judged again afterwards using the RHS’s new criteria-based system. Diarmuid won’t be there. He’s at Hampton Court. One Sunday environment hack has an interview lined up with Harry. There can’t be any good evening events on this year. I haven’t been invited to any anyway.
3. Chelsea odds:
Bradley Hole evens
Ulf 2/1
Balston 3/1
Myers 7/2
16/1 the rest
3. Peter Seabrook’s autograph Ebay £5.99. Titchmarsh £24.99. Monty Don £5.95. Charlie Dimmock 75p. Diarmuid Gavin £11.99, Joe Swift 99p
4. At Defra’s annual ministerial media reception. Owen Paterson, Richard Benyon, David Heath and Lord de Mauley were there along with a crowd of hacks and Defra PRs, plus some Borough Market-style Brit food purveyors.
After wading through pile of fag ends on Defra doorstep, much talk about a Brian May badger stunt outside Parly. No-one knew which badger was Brian. Radio 4 are no longer covering stunts where people dress as badgers, bees or foxes outside Parly. Doesn’t make good radio anyway.
OP gave a little speech on priorities, growing GB food, improving environment and his admiration for Australian-style stringent customs regimes after getting his boots washed there because they had Grand National mud on them.
He said he’d had to split up Polish and Hungarian enviro ministers who were arguing about bees and that he’d got hundreds of thousands of anti-gvt neonicotinoid emails. Defra is strong sticking to its guns in face of public opinion about bees, badgers, foxes.
How this event works: Low grade hacks try and make friends with higher up ones. Broadcast hacks pal up with PRs and ministers. Defra PRs v smiley -hope this means they will flag up report dates in the future.
5. TV star Michael Barrymore is working up to three days a week at a Tomlins garden centre in Brentwood, Essex. He says: “I don’t get paid for it. I help out because I enjoy gardening.”
6. Scotch osprey has ousted a Lake District one/ cruelty to badgers ‘almost doubles’ ahead of cull
7. Superb Monty interview as he goes French on us.
8. Unacceptable.
Plans to drop climate change from curriculum ‘unacceptable’ Guardian.
Sky News Australia Perth pitch invasions ‘unacceptable’ says Sanzar boss
New Zealand Herald-”From our point of view it’s extremely disappointing and unacceptable behaviour from a small group of idiots in what was otherwise a very good …John Kerry: ‘North Korea’s rhetoric is simply unacceptable’
Telegraph.co.uk He reiterated that North Korea “will not be accepted as a nuclear power,” and called the country’s bellicose rhetoric “simply unacceptable”. Five years’ jail for her life is unacceptable, says brother of woman …
Evening Standard
9. Bees by me:
Bill Oddie calls Owen Paterson a c**t
Harry and Chelsea
Monty and snooker
10. A busy Mont Don has also replied to an article I wrote for thinkinggardens
Mont said: “Monty Don:
I hesitate to dip my toe in these waters but for what it is worth, here is my pennyworth.
A number of points: Television, high-paying journalism, big name designers et al are all driven almost entirely by commercial pressures. Numbers rule. So if you earn your living in the gardening media – as I and a number of people posting here do – then you are pretty much forced to go with the numbers to earn your living. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Matthew and any other horticultural journalist would give their eye-teeth to get a highly paid gardening column – even if it meant simplifying and repeating those simplicities. Most garden readers and viewers are decent people wanting information and entertainment. They are, in some form, paying for that and you, writer or broadcaster, have to respect that.
Having been a horticultural hack for 25 years and written for every newspaper and most gardening mags I know that I would rather be read by three million people every week than speak to 300 like-minded souls. Television is a mass medium. Always has been. The more people you reach, the better. This does not necessarily mean you have to dumb down but certainly means there is always a pressure to. I think there is a compromise which is to try and simplify things and to inspire. Then people can move on and up.
Books are the medium in which one can truly express yourself – as Anne and others here have notably done. But gardening books sell tiny numbers compared to cooking for example. The great danger – as with the entire horticultural world – is that like speaks enthusiastically to like, everyone gets terribly pleased with themselves and their world draws a little tighter around them.
In the end the real pleasure is the doing. Almost everything interesting about technical gardening has already been said. I would much rather just garden at home than write or film about about it but if one has to go to work it is a pretty damn good way of doing it. So the best thing that one can possibly do as a writer or broadcaster is to enthuse and inspire others to actually go out and do it so they too can experience that satisfaction.
Er, that’s it.
Monty Don writer and broadcaster.
I’d say: “Garden writing is getting a lot better since I started getting published more in the nationals.” That will probably be the last time I am.
11. Spotted: Natalie Cassidy, Warwick Davies at London aquarium. Gambo at Oxford circus. Warren Gatland in Cardiff.
12. Have you ever watched? anns a gharadh alba-scottish gardening tv gaelic
13. Top selling gardening book: Titch? No Monty? No. Container Gardening by Richard Jackson.4,461. Between Miranda Hart and Jamie Bulger in Nielsen non-fiction charts. I’ve got a gardening book out in November btw. I’ll be happy with 4k sales.
14. New series of Superscrimpers is now on Channel 4. Martyn Cox is dishing out my money saving gardening tips across the ten week show. Brown sauce to clean secateurs is my favourite.
15. 481k people visted RHS shows last year, 70 pc women
87 pc abc1 17hrs tv, 1,350 press cuttings, 5000 tweets, 104 hrs radio
59 pc over 55.
16. Garsons Farm in Esher featured recently with Katie picking a carrot for CBeebies ‘I Can Cook’.
17. This guy wants waiter service at Dobbies.
18. Butterflies’ actress Wendy Craig opened Trent Valley Garden Centre (Stephen Smith’s), Doncaster Road on the outskirts of Scunthorpe on August 17, 1985. Do you remember her visit? What are your memories of the day? Leave your comments here.
19. The inimitable Soilman.
20. The Sun gardening domain name was recently bought for £30.
21. Nigel Slater now refers to Dan Pearson as his gardener. Since The Sun launched its Sunday edition it has never carried any gardening editorial, offer or advert.
22. Graham Paskett novel: www.findosmousetrap.co.uk
23. Spoke to Hessayon the other day. He’d sent me a letter. He said the sales of 16m refer just to books on houseplants and cut flowers. ‘the total number of Experts out there is over 53 million, ‘kindest regards Dave’.
24. Great and the good were at RHS Lindley Hall for launch AGMs. Roy Lancaster, Seabrook and lots of plantsmen. Twiglets on menu. I heard that TM had lost the pumpkin seed they paid record sums for. So rang them the next day. They said it was lost. At end of the day they rang back to say they’d found it. Also at the RHS awards recently in London. .
25. Heritage garden and garden show music is getting better, while numbers fell last year. Chelsea has Brian Eno doing the music for Jinny Blom/Prince Harry. British Sea Power played there once. At Cardiff a Steve Miller type band was playing, who might turn up at Hampton Court.
26. Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins is celebrating a decade at the children’s show by launching a children’s range called Seedlets.
The seeds, tools, watering cans, bags and wildlife houses come in beginner, intermediate and expert levels and are being marketed by LiteBulb Group and sold by King’s Seeds representatives into garden centres.
Collins launched the range at the Toy Fair at Olympia in London. He has ideas for more TV series through Alchemy TV such as 20 strangest plants and ‘River Cottage in the City’, saying: “It’s all very well millionaires doing it in country cottages”. He is also working with catering company ISS on School Food Matters, a project about growing your own in small playgrounds.
He has an RHS book, Grow Your Own for Kids out, and says: “I’ve never had a kid wobble on me. Every kid I’ve worked with gets engaged in gardening because it’s in our blood. We’ve been gardeners for thousands of years but it’s only in the last two decades we’ve been relying into supermarkets.”
27. Waitrose and Middle England middle of the road fave Titch collide in a trolley full of pleasant shopping, reliably-sourced food and the friendly face of afternoon light TV chat, Chelsea Flower Show and the occasional obsequious royal documentary. Waitrose is getting round the issue of BBC and commercial clashes (Titch will unveil new gardening ranges for Waitrose this month) through a “black out period” where he will not appear in Waitrose TV ads and promotions immediately before, during and after Chelsea Flower Show. He ran into a bit of flak when he fronted BQ for three years, because BBC guidelines don’t allow its presenters to commercially promote their field of expertise. Percy Thrower and Diarmuid Gavin fell foul of this and the BBC dropped them but AT has always managed to negotiate contracts to avoid the commercial conflict issue.
Titch is promoting Waitrose’s ‘commitment to British agriculture and horticulture’. He’s about helping British farmers, post-horsemeat crisis: “There is a real need to promote a greater understanding of just what is involved in producing healthy, well-grown produce and transporting it from field to fork so that it arrives with the consumer in the best possible condition.” So while gardening isn’t about gardening, it’s about shopping, supermarkets have gone the other way. They aren’t about groceries. They’re about farming. But most gardeners think they’re urban farmers now.
28. The wonders of twitter:
Defra UK @DefraGovUK
17h
Hi, this is David Heath. Really pleased to be taking part in today’s #loveourforests tweet-a-thon. Send me your questions!
View details •
matthew appleby @mattapple1
@DefraGovUK hi, what’s going to be in chalara action plan? quarantine zones? any hope for uk ash? will defra aim to save heritage ash? how?
No answer. Defra press office: “He got lots of questions.”
to all 832 households, and included questions like, “Have you noticed an increase in the number of deer in Dalton Gardens in the last three years?” 
