I am going on an adventure.

Day One:
I am currently in the back of a cab where the driver has decided that I want to chat – he is sadly mistaken as I would rather sleep. This week I have spent over 15 hours in taxis, for various reasons which will probably become clear within the next twelve months and I have developed a routine of friendly silence dotted with small snoozes. And podcast listening. Suffice to say that I am now a black belt in taxi travel.

The taxi deposits me at Terminal 2 at Heathrow where I am to catch an aeroplane to Beijing. I am flying China Air which is a new experience- there seems to be lots of legroom but a seat lacking a bit in bottom supporting upholstery. An extra security announcement apart from the usual guff about life jackets and emergency exits is from the security officer who tells us in no uncertain terms that “Interfering with the safe and efficient running of the cabin could result in criminal punishment- the security officer and the crew will perform their duties conscientiously”.

I have three hours to kill at Beijing airport- the smog is so thick I can see nothing from the windows except the gloom of distant hangers. I drink coffee and watch the world go past. A lot of people are wearing masks that cover nose and mouth which seems a little overboard when inside the terminal. There is a boy whose face is almost completely obscured who is being followed around by a lot of young women with cameras. He is either extremely famous or they have mistaken him for Monty Don.

I am going to Chengdu which is the capital city of Sichuan province. A largish city by Chinese standards with an urban population of about 11million. The aeroplane is leaping around like a excitable mouflon and I am finding it hard not to think of the possibility of plummeting earthwards. As you can see, I survive and arrive at Chengdu airport to be met with a wall of 37 degree heat that is like standing in a Sauna while wearing a morning coat and a cashmere muffler. I am whisked off along immaculate roads which are still swept by hand; there is a woman wandering along the side of the road, inches away from a stream of enormous trucks, with a broom made from grass and a dustpan on a stick.

We go the hotel where I shower and then to the venue where I will be doing my thing for six days – there are large posters of some my gardens and a divinely air conditioned studio. It is organised by a ompany called Sikastone who are all charming and efficient. From there we go and look at some model gardens and then to dinner – of which more later.
I flop into bed – long day, thank the lord for melatonin.

Day Two:

We are going to a market. This is Chengdu’s equivalent of Covent Garden
market: many plants and assorted traders. There are halls full of containers, accessories and all the stuff you would expect but with the enlivening addition of a lot of koi , terrapins, crabs and at least one pissed off squirrel.

There is a good range of plants and stuff and we roam about looking at things while being photographed by the marketing people. We then eat lunch and go off on a jaunt. Chengdu is on the edge of the mountains and, in those mountains live pandas. As we all know these animals are impossibly cute looking but absolutely dreadful at sustained reproduction. The females are only receptive for a very short time and the males, apparently, have inappropriately short penises. An invitation to a swinging party at the panda pad might result in disappointment. However, this city houses the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding where you can fill your boots with panda based smoochiness. Our one mistake was to visit in the afternoon as the pandas, having spent the morning cavorting, conversing and possibly minuetting have now lunched handsomely on the finest bamboo shoots and are all asleep- with one exception.


They are still gorgeous and cute ranging from small bundles who were only born last month to lumbering stud males that lie like endangered rugs on the floor of their pens. I reckon we saw about twenty five of them which is probably the most you will ever see anywhere.

DayThree:

My students Are generally delightful although they are unembarrassed about using their mobiles during talks.* The Chinese are wedded to their phones more than anybody else – everywhere people are head down and scrolling. I thought I was bad but I have never considered doing it while riding a motorcycle in traffic.

Environmental note – the Chinese currently have no idea/interest in the perils of single use plastic. Even plates in restaurants are wrapped in plastic, clingfilm abounds and plastic bags are everywhere. It is all very well for us to get all smug about Bags for Life and banning plastic straws but until we get the x million Chinese on side we are pissing in the ocean – if that is not too inappropriate a metaphor. That is not to say we should give up our modest efforts but we should not kid ourselves into thinking that everybody is hanging onto David Attenborough’s very word. There is very large mountain of micro beads to climb.

First day seemed to go fine – I talked a great deal. Having a translator is good and bad. Good because it means that they (in this case the delightful Laura) talk for half the time so, in theory, it is less work. Bad because the talk becomes slightly staccato and constantly interrupted so one never gets the chance to riff freely.

Second day I had designated as a studio day where they all drew gardens and then I critiqued them politely ensuring (I hope) that nobody lost face and everyone felt loved and encouraged.

Day Five (or four, quite frankly I have rather lost track)
We are going shopping- each student is to design and plant a container and , when divided into teams, a quadrant of a small gardener. I have suggested a choice of different styles and it is now up to them.
In the morning I talk about various gardens followed by
We pile onto a bus and return to the market.

It is gleeful chaos. The students charge off, get separated, come together (Because they are summoned by the extraordinary power of WeChat), get lost, buy a load of plants and finally return to the bus. Everyone seems to have had fun, the nurseries had a bit of a bonus afternoon and the only damage was to me when I got whacked on the leg by a falling window box. We load up the plants: this statement makes the process sound considerably easier than it actually was. Three wheeled trucks keep appearing laden with yet more grasses (the naturalistic style seems to be popular amongst the up and coming Chinese garden designers) that are squeezed into three trucks and the boot of a large bus. We make our way back to the studio as it begins to rain.

I am grabbed by a stall holder who is eager to both sell me roses and talk English he goes about both tasks with gusto and at volume. He shows me an okay rise bred by his father and tells me how much he loves Zmr Bean and Michael Jackson. I feel that this is the wrong moment to talk about the latter’s many failings as he may not be aware and who am I to shatter illusions?

Day Sixish
It is raining quite hard and my students are supposed to be planting containers (two groups) or their gardens (other two groups) but I cannot send them out in the rain- although they would probably have been fine with that such is their stoicism. So I deliver a slightly impromptu hour and half on the history and inner workings of the Chelsea Flower Show. By the time I do that the rain has eased and off they go.

Lunch is followed by more garden supervision until I realise that the container lot are going to finish well before the garden lot. I need to deliver another talk so put together an hour on colour in about eight minutes. I get away with it but it sounded a bit off. Nobody noticed except me.

By five o’clock two gardens have been planted and the teams are in high spirits. We go to dinner with the chap who owns the studio building and much of the land around. He is the only person I have met so far who is older than I am. He used to be an artillery colonel for 24 years having been brought up during the cultural revolution when there were no universities not school exams do all he did was draw. Having becomequite good he joined the army and because of this skill got involved in drawing propaganda posters and the like. Because of this his term was relatively cushy in comparison to his contemporaries and he progressed from army to government. He left in 1992 with some land upon which he started building apartments and studios for artists and is now doing very nicely thank you having invested in modern Chinese art and property.
We eat frogs.

Uber, or at least the Chinese company that bought Uber China, sends a driver on an electric scooter. This is folded up and popped in the boot, the driver covers the driving seat with his own seat cover, hops in and off we go. All this because my friends have been drinking (not much) and I sure as hell am not going to even think about driving anytime Soon in this city.

Day Zero
Here we go again. The other two groups start building their gardens while more containers are put together. In the afternoon we judge gardens, there is much jollity and a graduation ceremony which involves me expressing my gratitude and congratulating everyone on their diligence and enthusiasm. It has been a very interesting and entertaining week. I enjoyed the students, I enjoyed the teaching and I enjoyed Chengdu very much.
I also ate a lot of odd things- so many that I think it is worth a blog of it’s own otherwise this post will try the patience of even the most diligent of reader- if there are any left out there.

After the graduation we tootle off for dinner with the whole organising team (those who have not already legged it back to Beijing). There are many sad faced fish swimming around glass tanks awaiting the inevitable. I am quite pooped and was expecting that we would rumble off for early bed before going to the airport in the morning: I was wrong. We wander up the road for a Chinese massage. Three of us are in one room where we change into pyjamas and are attended by three very jolly women. Our feet are plunged into warm water and then the ladies lay in with a will. My head is pressed and squeezed, my legs punched and pummelled, my feet are rubbed – I have very sensitive feet so this is an extremely painful fifteen minutes, I endure this in a very stoic way by use of steady breaths and thinking of England. It jolly well won’t do to let Johnny Foreigner see us cry: came within a whisker of letting the side down. I think it was doing me good.
After that we all lay there while the therapists assembled various tools including a feather, a little bulb that puffed air, a headtorch,a tuning fork, some long tweezers and a selection of probes. They then proceeded to clean our ears: a novel experience.

Day Eleventy four:

To the airport in the rain. There is a motorcycle with umbrella attached to the handlebars weaving in and out of thundering lorries and swishy new cars. On the hard shoulder a man in a coolie hat and sweeps his section of the road by hand. China old and new: it is a amazing country with marvellous people: it is also far removed from a western style democracy which, looking at the mess Britain is in because of democracy may not be an entirely bad thing. At the moment it is a toss up whether I would rather have Boris Johnson or a serious man in a grey suit looking after my interests.

I am listening to silence as I am sitting in Glasgow Airport waiting for an absent aeroplane. It is four hours late. Thanks Flybe.

  • WeChat is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp and a bank all rolled into one. They communicate, watch videos, post stuff and, most interestingly, pay for everything via WeChat. Every shop, street stall, cafe or car park has a QR code. Even a bloke wandering through the streets hawking a bike load of peaches eschews cash in favour of a QR code. You scan it with your phone and the bill is paid. No messing around.
    It is amazing and works without problem- the advantage is that there is no competition, none of the other social networks are allowed here. Except that there are always ways to get round this small inconvenience…

I know that this might seem like a massive generalization but Americans are not like other people. I am not talking about anything particularly specifi,c and I am definitely not mentioning Donald Trump, but just in their attitude to life. They are generally breezy and a tiny bit overfamiliar, they are usually well meaning, good people but there is just something, how shall I put, not very British about them.

This has been brought home to me once more by a talk about Plants. Nice chap works for a company called Proven Winners whose products I have noticed knocking around the place before but not paid much attention. Mostly because almost all their stuff is, to my eyes at least, a bit, well, American and burdened with cutesy names. It is, I have discovered today, all about marketing. They spend 6c per plant on marketing, 3c on the label but only 7c on the nurseryfolk who produce the things. They are selling plants in a way and at a volume that we will probably never do.

It is a bit like a cult – an impression that was reinforced by the chap talking sounding more and more like a preacher as the minutes ticked by – he stopped just short of offering full immersion baptism but you tell by the glint in his eye that he was considering it right up to the wire. As far as I could work out they are mostly trying to sell plants to people who don’t really like gardening very much. Petunias that don’t need deadheading, roses that require no pruning, hydrangeas that flower all summer, instant container mixes (called flower pillows). Each plant has a distinctive white pot (white, we are told, is the most expensive plastic) and, as mentioned above, have silly names. Amazel Basil, for example, or Tangerine Slice A Peel Thunbergia or Lo and Behold Lilac Chip Butterfly Bush. Succulents are marketed using a bug eyed turtle – they increased the eye size which made it cuter and therefore more appealing to the punter.

They have billboards (probably at least three of them just outside Ebbing, Missouri) which are analysed by eye tracking technology to see which bit catches the customer’s eye – the flower centres are dulled down so that you look mostly at the logo rather than the flowers. There are YouTube videos of people excitedly unboxing the Plants – apparently, and this is a phenomenon that had passed me by, there is a great demand from people who like to watch other people unwrap things.

They are, in a way, exploiting the modern addiction to online shopping: a substantial percentage of their orders come in overnight when insomniacs cruise the internet looking for things that they don’t really need but want delivered very quickly. There is a lot of research into people’s favourite colour – women prefer purple generally. They use smiley “influencers” to sell the idea – if I was a grumpy old man then I would splutter about influencers but, as I am not, I will not.

To us, well to me at least, it seemed wrong and unnatural to treat Plants in the same way as soap powder or fizzy drinks. We like our plants to be exotic and ideally from a small, family run specialist nursery operating on alternate tuesdays from a tumbledown (though picturesque) shack a long way up a single track road. This is because we are gardeners and have this deep respect and love for plants. We like a bit of botanical Latin and we enjoy a bit of a challenge.

It is easy to be all snotty about populism but that would not only be ill mannered but also a mistake. What are non-gardeners buying and from where? They are buying something in flower in a fit of enthusiasm while visiting Homebase on a warm bank holiday weekend or as an impulse buy while at the IKEA checkout. IKEA shift 40million plants a year this way, all of them bred to be tough. Lavender, for example, begins as a cutting in Kenya, goes through adolescence in Portugal and eventually ends up in a shed just outside Milton Keynes where it will be lugged and manhandled as if it was a bag of tea lights or a flat pack kitchen chair. No water, no primping, no care at all but they survive.

These plants will liven up a terrace or a window box for a while but, like new year resolutions, once the initial burst of enthusiasm has passed they will probably be dead by Christmas at the latest – usually they succumb when people go off on their summer holidays. These are people who are not gardeners but like flowers. Indeed they would quite like to have pretty gardens but not so much that they want to do any actual gardening.

Perhaps we need to think more about these people, they are the majority. Perhaps we need to think about the Proven Winners model in Britain and focus on plants that are easy to grow, flower for long periods of time, thrive on neglect and appeal to our baser instincts. We might even consider giving them cute names. At a time when the old family nurseries are finding it increasing difficult to survive we should perhaps think more about selling things better and more aggressively. There seems to be a huge market out there for selling plants to customers who don’t give a damn about plants.

Especially if they come in a nice box.

I am listening Gypsies and Indians by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra.

More than a month since I last wrote this blog. Ooops.

Odd how sometimes one has lots to say and other times the conversation dries up a bit and we lapse into a convivial silence for a bit. I then worry that I should be blogging while you sit back and enjoy the peace.

I also have a mild problem in that (whispers) this is not the only blog I write and sometimes one of the others snaffles the ideas. Yes, I am a blog bigamist, I am faithless and feeble of will, I will chase after any old blog shaped skirt that winks at me to the detriment of this old and faithful thing. Unspeakable and caddish behaviour but, in my defence, (which is a pathetic defence) I am going through a mid life blog crisis and will attempt to mend my ways.

At times like this I think the snappy checklist school of blogging is what is called for: in no particular order except the order in which they tumble from my head.

1. Last month was the Garden Media Guild Awards at which I won nothing although the sibling of this blog (see above – the use of the word sibling makes my unfaithfulness somehow worse) was shortlisted. I fear that there may be a drift away from self-indulgent nonsense blogging towards fact and useful stuff about gardening. Such is the way of the world.

2. Chelsea Press Launch. On the same day I compered the press launch for Chelsea Flower Show 2013. It was in the Connaught Hotel (thanks to the kindness of M&G) where each person was provided with a little tin of mints: to be perfectly accurate two tins of mints: one from M&G and one from the Connaught. Small tins of mints are obviously the absolute bees-knees of corporate gifting.

3. I returned to the Connaught after the GMG Awards thing. Many repaired to the pub, some hastened home and others simply lay down in the nearest doorway and slept. I thought that what the afternoon demanded was not a hot, sweaty and loud pub but ridiculously expensive cakes and small sandwiches to the sound of a harpist. We were an exclusive and generally delicious band of cake eaters – The Connaught has an exquisite entrance with a narrow revolving door. A proper one with brushes on the floor and room for no more than one person at a time.

4. I drove to Devon in the worst of the rain. Usually I am sweetness and light to my fellow man, always happy to give the benefit of the doubt and lend an umbrella to a stranger (i) but the odd moment of schadenfreude is always satisfying. Picture this: early morning, skiddy roads, grey skies, rain and general dullness. Everybody trundling along carefully avoiding accidents and driving too quickly through large puddles lest we soak pedestrians. Everybody? no, not everybody one person (sex unknown but the smart money is on male) in a low slung BMW is driving like a jerk. Swinging around, overtaking badly, all that stuff. We approach a large flood. I drive in, he drives in behind me. I drive out…….. Oh dear. I am alone.

5. Lectures: I seem to have given a load of lectures over the past month or so – at one I was described as “not as buff as Chris Beardshaw” which as good a thing as any to have as an epitaph. I know my place and I no longer have buttocks so taut you could bounce 2p pieces off them.

6. I have a newish car. I am unnecessarily thrilled by the little extras and left cold by the important bits. The engine size, mileage per gallon or resale value is of very little interest to me. I am, however, very excited by the fact that my telephone plugs into a little USB thing in the glovebox. That there is a button that shuts the boot automatically. That something beeps when I reverse anywhere near any solid objects – the closer you get, the more frantic the beep, this is particularly useful to avoid incidents such as this. All this and an entire picnic table in the back seat which I will never use.

7. I have laid out a lot of plants in various parts of the country. Sometimes in truly horrid weather. I have got an interesting project in Sussex at a garden called Borde Hill. We have just replanted a narrow border which is romantically named Paradise Walk. It has been stripped and replanted with a spatter of herbaceous stuff. There are Monardas, Kniphofias, Zizias, Geranium Rozanne and many other jolly things. I would show you a picture except that a patch of mud covered wityh pots is not a terribly inspiring sight. Instead I urge you to visit Borde Hill next summer and see for yourselves.

8. That is probably enough for the moment, other things have happened but if I tell you everything you will never get round to eating poultry and flatulent vegetables.

Next time I blog there will be a new Episode of intoGardens in the App store. It is a thing of extreme beauty and deserves to be seen by every iPad owner in the world. My problem is that I do not know all of them so would very much appreciate any help you might be inclined to shovel my way. Spread the word please, people and I will be forever in your thrall.

I am listening to a slightly stroppy ticket collector on the Euston-Manchester train. The picture is of the window of Scott’s Restaurant in Mount Street looking festive.

Happy Christmas to all and thank you for reading my tosh once again.

(i) This may be the reason why I have no umbrellas