So the Garden Monkey has an infallible Champagne Tracker Device too – just like the Hort Week team. Why wasn’t s/he at the Future Gardens Laurent-Perrier trough yesterday? Maybe s/he was.    

The clear picture shows the Cayman Islands’ gold winning exhibit of an undersea garden. The blob shows my uncategorized underwater photograph of a Cayman Reef.

This is the Cayman Islands’ second ever garden at Chelsea so the gold is not at all bad. In fact it’s a miracle they agreed to come back at all after last year when Dutch customs officials confiscated the Cayman Islands’ rare ghost orchids in transit to the UK. Remember this if you come across a bloke down a dark alley offering you, ‘Genuine ghost orchids. honest gov’.

Virgin snow in Regent’s Park and along the Regent’s canal.Freezing wind chilling my cheeks and shaking the last red leaves off the Metasequoia glyptostroboides. A pool of red spread around the tree and across part of the lake beside. Scent of pine wafting across the path.
Puzzled ducks wander about on the ice. So few people are walking to work in this beautiful sunshine. Why? Especially on Monday when, once again, the tube strike hit. I came into Paddington and walked across Hyde Park and St James Park (my fave) to work at the FT on Southwark Bridge.
What a wonderful start to the day.
This evening I walked back across the Millennium Bridge. St Paul’s was floodlit in red. It looked magnificent. Then onto Salt Yard for Tapas with Barbara de Lacey and finally a number 24 bus through the snow back to Camden.
    

Tony Heywood’s thing. Some people were comparing it to Niki de Saint Phalle’s stuff. No way.


Bruno Marmiroli’s tree through coal.Followed by: classic Ivan Hicks; golden dog turds (odd, even for FG);sitting hole in Hugo Bugg & Maren Hallenga’s modestly named Narratives of Nature; Peter Thomas’ Metamorphosis and the beehive bogs.

    

Biggest numbers by far, with some having to watch on the monitors outside the Gardening Matters forum tent, were for Sarah Eberle’s talk. Sarah http://www.saraheberle.com/ is the pixie-like star of Hampton Court and Chelsea with the energy of a nuclear reactor. This year, with six week’s notice, she built three gardens on £15,000. Peanuts. Larger Chelsea gardens can cost up to half a million.    

Out here in Taiwan looking at the Floral Expo and stuff has started to kick off with the Baka people in Cameroon. I think I’m on the wrong continent. Damn.    

Il Presidente Dominic demonstrating the Mexican Cough.
2 The Hort Week mob proving that their Champagne Tracker Device is infallible.
3 Matthew Appleby shortly before he throttled Bob Sherman to get Garden Organic’s Guru to spill the Green beans.
4 Nice gate
5 The world’s only ugly Regency feature: a Gardenesque Mound as invented by poor, boring, worthy old John Loudon who died standing up while dictating his latest book.
6 Rosa Mundi, swoon.
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Ulf Nordfell, this year’s king of Chelsea, strolls in with a posse of sleek-looking Swedes. They are staying at the Swedish Embassy which sounds swish until he tells me that it’s full of Ikea furniture. I wonder if our diplomatic outposts are furnished from Homebase.
Tricky moment when sound man tries to clip a mike to Ulf’s new black leather Armani jacket but GP James smoothes ruffled foliage with an even smoother introduction for Ulf’s ‘conversation’ with me as his bit of the afternoon is billed.