My father didn't show but he grew chrysanthemums and begonias that were show quality and I think I've mentioned there were times when a bloom or two would find their way into another man's exhibit. He and his brothers worked my grandfather's green house  where they grews tomatoes during the wartime. In the twenties, my father had grown chrysanthemums for the London Christmas market, sending them down by train a few days before Christmas day. I doubt if he made a great deal of money but, like grandfather, he was always busy with something and I've tried to be the same.http://www.amazon.com/dp/1535417188

Best in Show started out as a short story which found Miss Kirkwood retired and struggling to make sure Cairndhu Flower Show's Best in Show award would not be won by someone who treated his wife rather like a slave. Not something uncommon in the fifties but by no means the norm. In most instances the wife ran the home and her rules were not only observed by her husband but reinforced if the bairns broke any of them. By the fifties, the old 'miner's rows' were jhad been mostly replaced with decent housing but some still remained. In one village the houses had been undermined and the walls had cracks you could put your hand through. The sense of community in those old rows was strong and few who needed help didn't get it.

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Flower shows seem a long way off at this time of year but thankfully I have photographs and images to remind me of brighter times . The picture below is a King Protea from the garden in front of the church in Pniel near Cape Town, the village where those magnificent pumpkins were grown.http://www.amazon.com/dp/1535417188

Memories of the village flower show have an extra dimension for me. When I was about fourteen, the committee laid on n afternoon dance for the teens. I was a member of the Scout Highland Dance Display team and danced the Eightsome Reel, Dashing White Sergeant and the Strathspeys, but was taken by surprise when a girl I had admired for some time came to ask me to dance a quickstep or something. When I told her I couldn't do 'modern dance', she told me I could try but I was quite adamant I wasn't going to make a fool of myself. Eventually, she glared at me and walked off. As I watched her go, I thought, this will NEVER happen to me again. It was the first,but far from the last time that lassie inspired me to get on with things. The picture was taken years after we were married http://www.amazon.com/dp/1535417188

I set Best in Show in a mining village in Southern Scotland because most of the miners were proud of their garden. One chap I worked with had a garden of the standard one sees in the magazines. When he was moving from one council house to another he asked the incoming tenant if he would be prepared to pay something for the shrubs and plants that he had planted and arranged. The new chap refused and my friend transplanted everything, including rows and rows of potatoes. He told me the potatoes survived and cropped. I wouldn't want you to get the impression that I knew people who were mean but... http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1535417188

In South Africa, this is mid-summer and people are getting ready for flower show.The nearest I came to Cairndhu was in a village called Pniel in the Swart River Valley that the slaves - people of mixed race- had built when they were freed in 1834.From the picture, you can see how successful they are at growing. They were lovely people, self sufficient in many ways and in no way inferior, despite apartheid. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1535417188

In one office I worked in, one of the women had a pot plant, which she talked to. Being an engineer and sceptical, for a kind of joke, every time I walked past the plant I muttered to it - Drop dead. To my amazement, the damn thing was dead inside a month. The blame didn't go to the woman who forgot to water it, of course, so, now, I even chat to vegetables when I visit them and naturally the Cairndhu gardeners encourage their Flower Show exhibits.
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I was worrying about how I could follow up Best in Show but I took some copies to a country market on Friday and readers were telling me about flower shows they remembered from the fifties. If this carries on then we will be back in Cairndhu with John Brown, Miss Kirkwood

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1535417188, and of course, Jinks

Cairndhu - In this frosty winter weather, nobody in our mining village went digging their garden but a lot of time was spent looking at seed and bulb catalogues. My father would mention he thought such and such would be look good and ask for an opinion. My mother might comment on the colour, or ask if it had a scent, which chrysanthemums have but it's not a rose. I was expected to give advice on the shape and any other characteristics. Occasionally, my father would change his mind, if I was VERY insistent. I suppose we used it as an escape, mining could be a grim business at times but at least it was warm underground even in a blizzard.

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