Diary 2010

March 10th

Here we are two months later and what seems like a record cold winter still upon us here in northern Britain. Snowdrops and Aconites are still in flower and the first garden daffodil (of many hundreds) has yet to produce anything other than a tight bud. Most morning we wake up to a ground frost although the sun is often shining too. The air temperature has stayed below 10 Celsius for months now.

I have started the long process of adding extra navigation to the site as well as adding many of the library photos collected in the past years. Under letters A and B (so far) you can now move directly to the next plant in alphabetical order on the site without retuning to an index (as before) but in addition using the green, red or purple arrows move exclusively between plants photographed in Britain, Australia and Europe.

There are 2,147 plants on site now with another 420 waiting to be added.

January 10th

After a furious first part of December 2009 when 45 new plants were added to the site, I stopped in order to prepare my first Powerpoint talk based around digital photos with a laptop connected to a new digital projector. Eventually the talk was complete with hyperlinks to various sections including a Firefox gallery of expandable photos but the arctic weather closed in to most of Great Britain and the whole thing was cancelled just after I had completed two successful rehearsals. So I now have a one hour illustrated talk on the Wild Orchids of Great Britain and Europe all prepared with nowhere to go. I'm sure it'll find a place somewhere when the weather gets a bit better.

As part of the talk I've had to investigate the correct naming of European Orchids and a bigger taxonomic dog's breakfast you will rarely see in any other sphere of the classification of living things. There is simply no agreement between some quite distinguished authorities such as World Checklist, Kew and Pierre Delforge so different names proliferate for the same plant, particularly the Bee Orchids - exactly the opposite of the intention behind systematic naming. Poor old Carl Linnaeus will be turning in his grave. We might as well stick to the common English names but of course not all plants have them.