To get completely and utterly lost in London’s’ famous Kew Gardens and Loib Classical Library in USA, all in one day, without the benefit of the Concorde, without even leaving the house, is really quite an experience for a relative newcomer to the Net like me. Toss in The Digger’s Club in Australia, a South African Bulb Farm and a Spanish cut-flower and seed farm for good measure and wow!
My wander around the Internet world of global gardens was prompted by sheer curiosity mixed with a liberal dash of “I told you so!” to a friend who advised me to forget my huge collection of horticultural books in favour of the world wide web where information would be easier and much faster to find. I was not at all certain about this, hence my ‘walkabout’, which, incidentally, can only be done when both the electricity and telephone are working and, even then, only at my desk. I don’t have a laptop, as against curling up in my favourite arm chair with a much loved book which doesn’t evaporate when the connection drops!
Willing to give this new fangled stuff a try, I first selected something familiar to see what they have to offer hence my trip to Kew Gardens www.rbgkew.org.uk. I was not disappointed; far from it, I highly recommend this site to anyone interested, no matter how vague in the subject of horticulture. This site is a real treat with lots and lots of easy to understand information plus mouthwatering photographs to go with it. How I got to Loib Classical Library was quite by accident. I was reading a gardening bulletin when I noticed a ‘link’ to the origin of the Elm trees in the UK. I clicked it and discovered that the Elm was introduced there by a Roman viticuturalist/agriculturalist/horticulturalist by the name of Columella who was born, in Spain, about AD70. To my fascination I then discovered that the three books he wrote on these subjects are now viewed as being extremely futuristic and very applicable to today’s world of organic gardening. Trying to track down these books, which I eventually managed, is how I ended up in this particular library. Addictive stuff indeed and these books are now added to my ‘must have-wish list!’ All you need to do is type Columella into your chosen search engine and off you go.
The Digger’s Club in Australia www.diggers.com.au is an organic gardening and heritage seed set up whose catalogue I drool over annually. Their site isn’t as attractive as their actual publication but is still of interest though there are quite a number of seed varieties which they don’t supply outside Australia.
The Royal Horticultural Society www.rhs.org.uk is another informative gem and if growing freesias is your game then a retired Danish gentleman, settled in the Andalusia just may be your solution www.freesias.dk.
Really getting to grips with the horticultural wanderlust I got heavily involved with a fantastic seed catalogue with over 5,000 varieties of seeds on offer and a decent amount of information, though short on illustrations, for each one www.chilternseeds.co.uk, found numerous American seed companies with little more to offer than ‘Hard sell’... but not to residents of Pakistan I must add.
Deciding to revert to desi I moved on to search for information on what Pakistani web sites have to offer on the horticultural front. Not much, frankly speaking although one site www.pakissan.com does show promise. This claims, probably quite correctly, to be Pakistan’s first agricultural web site and, along with a variety of interesting news clippings, offers the online services of 34 horticulturalists, including one each in India, Nepal and Saudi Arabia, 21 plant breeders, 33 entomologists and six plant pathologists; most of these hold university positions and the six I selected to contact for information have not, so far, bothered to reply!
A second Pakistani site www.telmedpak.com which I had come across previously when searching for information on herbs is not, at the moment, available as the domain name recently expired and, at the time of writing, has not been renewed.
Doing a general search for horticulture in Pakistan throws up lots of government departments and university admission information, not, on the whole, of much interest to average garden enthusiasts.
Getting a bit bored with Pakistani horticultural sites, or the lack of them, I went back to globetrotting at random. Gardening in Japan and Korea throws up some interesting items as does gardening in India and Italy. I was going great guns by now I can tell you! Throwing in gardening in Pakistan, only fair to persist in being patriotic after all, conjured up a newspaper story on how Saddam Hussein enjoys gardening, eating muffins and reading poetry whilst in jail in Iraq, not Pakistan!
I went back to globetrotting in disgust!
Australian daffodil seeds, Dutch tulip seeds, Japanese flower seeds, European tree seeds, Oriental vegetable seeds, all gave numerous interesting sites so, I had to give patriotism one last try and entered a search for Pakistani seeds. Jackpot!
Do we have our own seeds or not? Surprise, surprise, we do indeed and these must be pretty rare seeds indeed. Our home grown variety of seeds is nothing less than a cleric warning about sowing the seeds of an Islamic Revolution! Not quite what I had in mind but, there you have it!
To get completely and utterly lost in London’s’ famous Kew Gardens and Loib Classical Library in USA, all in one day, without the benefit of the Concorde, without even leaving the house, is really quite an experience for a relative newcomer to the Net like me. Toss in The Digger’s Club in Australia, a South African Bulb Farm and a Spanish cut-flower and seed farm for good measure and wow!
