#1

Well, this is my first ever blog post.  I'm pretty sure that what the world is missing right now is a gardening blog - you'd have thought someone might want to write about what's going on outside.

Maybe not.  But I will try and make this one a little different.

I decided to start a blog for a number of reasons:

1. Purely selfishly, to organise myself and get horticulturally related goings on straight in my head.
2. Because I have recently upgraded to Windows 8 and can no longer use a computer, therefore I would like to make myself feel better by getting 'down with the technology'.
3. To continue to have the ability to express myself in over 140 characters.

I'm now going to do that 'about me' thing - so you can decide if you'd like to keep reading or not.

A couple of years ago I slipped out of the side door of actual gardening and into education with the RHS.  This is now what I spend most of my time doing (75% officially...); running courses and workshops at RHS Wisley.  I love my job, enthusing and de-panicking people about plants and their garden.

The other official 25% is now spent on a PhD at the University of York, on Colonialism and Horticulture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  When I have stopped being alarmed by the scale of the thing I will be looking at plants and gardens in Britain and the colonies, how each contributed to the other and how much gardens were a social glue that stuck the empire together, or not.

Other than that I give some of the remaining time to the Institute of Horticulture organising their very fabulous Young Horticulturist of the Year competition in the south west.  So if you'd like to enter and live in the south east - get in touch!

I am particularly interested in interpretation in public gardens and how we currently do ourselves a disservice with the quantity and quality of it.  Horticulture as a career interests me greatly, mainly in how we improve ourselves and become an aspirational career.

Well, that's about it as tea's ready.  I'm sure the next post with be both structured and informative.

Oh, I am neither cool or trendy, you may as well know from the outset.