How did we miss it?  It’s been ‘National Gardening Week’ since 27 April.  Who knew?

Goddesses know we’re major pro-garden people, so I don’t want to sound churlish, but I think their PR and media office needs a bit of work, ’cause we’ve been nothing but ‘switched on’ to media news – to a compulsive, even possibly unhealthy degree.  And in all of this I don’t recall any stories about this annual celebration in any of the domestic news channels – BBC, Sky News, Channel 4… Just saw it now on Monty’s Gardener’s World..  But one mention in a specialist show does not a publicity campaign make.

National Gardening Week suffers lexical confusion too, as it’s ‘National’ but also for all of the UK, despite calling the various devolved areas within the UK ‘Nations’ – as in Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland being separate and distinct ‘nations’ which are united within the wider ‘kingdom.’ Nations which increasingly pull and twist against a wider Westminster ‘grain’, not just vis-a-vis responses to Coronavirus in present days, but previously and continuously with response to Brexit, among other issues.  Kudos to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon for staying strong and doing what she thinks is right for her ‘region.’

National Gardening Week ends on Sunday 3 May.

Post-Note: This morning (6 May 2020) we awoke to an announcement on the Today Programme (Channel 4 Radio) that Wales is in the process of changing the name of the Welsh Assembly in order to reflect the ‘parliamentary’ nature of their governing body.  So ‘Assembly’ is out the window, and now it’s the Welsh Parliament, in control of taxes, health, social care and much else.  A nation in their own right with their own Parliament.

Scotland is equally (and in some sense ahead of the curve) in terms of their national identity – helped in part by long-standing legal differences between the running of life in Scotland as compared to England. Now it’s just a question of how far the tensions will pull away from Westminster.  Why is there no English assembly?  Why does Westminster rule the roost? What benefit to the other nations for this arrangement? Beneficial to Wales, to Northern Ireland, to Scotland? How so? Merely for a military, for example? Or less benefit and more liability?

There are no straightforward answers to these questions, but in coming days, when Brexit returns to the scene, these questions will indubitably become more and more pressing.  Just like with the seeds and all else in life – ‘on verra!’