You don’t expect to see much flower power in a Japanese garden at any time of year and so to come across a rose garden in full bloom in the middle of winter was quite something. I found this lovely surprise at the Fukuoka Botanical Garden, which is set high above the city in the Minami-koen Park. The display consisted of several dozen varieties of floribunda and hybrid tea roses, all in full flower and in perfect condition. It gets as cold in Fukuoka in winter as it does in England and they had snow here yesterday, so conditions are hardly ideal. Mind you, should I be so surprised, after being taken aback by the quality of the roses which were supplied to my garden at the Gardening World Cup here in October. The Japanese love their roses, and they certainly know how to grow them.
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The roses shown are Rosa Meigronuri “Gold Bunny” and Rosa Meiridge “Charleston”.

The Japanese love Christmas and there are Santas everywhere – we saw 30 of them assembled on the river bank in Kyoto (goodness knows why) and Colonel Sanders dressed as Father Christmas outside KFC. But Christmas Day isn’t a public holiday in Japan and we took advantage of a normal train service to take the shinkansen to Hiroshima and visit the A-Bomb museum. ​

The photo on the album cover showed a painfully thin, unlovely young man holding a guitar. In contrast to all the other albums on display, no attempt had been made to show a pretty picture. “If a man as ugly as that has made a record, his music must be good” I reasoned, and bought it, without hearing a note of his music first. This was pretty reckless of me because it cost 32s 6d, which, as my pocket money was only £3 a term, was nearly half of everything I had.

My teenage instinct turned out to be spot on. Bert Jansch’s first album was one of the best folk/blues records made. I became such as fan that I even persuaded my school to invite him to play at a concert. Heavens knows what the dour Glaswegian made of the posh public school, or of the boy who followed him into the gents and got him to sign his album.

A blow torch with a 14 inch flame (the Tarantella) is the next best thing to a flame thrower, but if one of those isn’t at hand to get rid of the weeds, how about a dose of sulphuric acid? As even Bart Simpson knows, the trick with sulphuric acid is to add it to water, never the other way round. If water is added to the acid, heat is generated with the result that steam and acid shoot into the air, with horrible results if they hit your face.​

When, after swimming several thousand miles, Atlantic salmon reach the Riverside Hotel on the River Kent, they are within sniffing distance of their final destination. It must come as a shock to them to find their way blocked by a weir, which they can’t swim over- they have to jump. None make it at the first attempt and nothing pleases visitors to the Riverside more than watching them try and try again until they finally make the leap over the top.
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From there it’s a quick sprint to the spawning ground at Kentmere. Or it used to be. For now, a new hazard has arisen, just above the weir, where a family of hungry otters are waiting to grab the exhausted salmon. Otters are nocturnal creatures, rarely seen, but here at the Riverside there have been numerous sightings this autumn. One lucky guest saw an otter pluck a salmon from the swirling water and settle down to eat it on the river bank. Other guests have seen two new offspring of the otter family playing on the base of the piers to Stramongate Bridge, directly in front of the hotel’s restaurant.
If you can stay at the Riverside, who needs Autumnwatch?

Hoteliers have been gloating since Attack of the Trip Advisors went out. The programme followed a bunch of seriously odd characters as they went about the country on a mission to find fault with whichever place they stayed at, after which they would post nasty reviews on TripAdvisor. It made for very entertaining TV, the funniest of the weirdoes being Ricky, who took his Gran with him on holiday. ​

No trip to London nowadays is complete without a visit to its latest tourist attraction, the tented village of St Paul’s.  I was delighted to see that it has a gardening theme, with a large sign above the tents proclaiming “Compost Capitalism”.
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My first impression was how small it is – not so much a village as a hamlet, with no-one around.

“It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedgefundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and olligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self regard”
              – Charles Saatchi

I enjoyed the coincidence of being at the party to launch Charles Saatchi’s latest collection “Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany” at the same time as he launched into an attack on his fellow collectors who, as he said, “circulate in a giddy round of glass-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another”. 

Christopher Holliday, the garden designer and writer, will always have a special place in my affections because of his generosity when I first started on the garden here at Yewbarrow House.  He had a rather famous and very splendid garden just down the road from me, which inspired me to have a go at mine, and Christopher not only encouraged my new-found enthusiasm but helped me with the design.  When Christopher’s latest book “Houses of the Lake District” landed (with a thump – its massive) I happened to be looking at “Gardens Old and New” by Avray Tipping, which was published in 1900. ​

Hot on the heels of Appleby Creamery Organic Brie winning the prize for ‘Best Cheese’ at the Fine Dining Awards, its retailer, and my favourite food shop, Low Sizergh Barn won the Cumbria Life award tonight for the county’s best Farm Shop. The citation spoke of their amazing tea shop and their range of 2,000 products, but the best thing of all about Sizergh Barn, which nobody mentioned, is their magnificent policy on carrier bags. ​