Roper's Miscellany

7th November 2025. In spring Sammy was dividing up some plants of flowers currant and I took one piece to turn into a container grown, single stem cordon. It has settled down well and  now it is putting out small new shoots and buds some of which may turn into early spring flowers. Pruning is best done after flowering and I shall look forward to that if I can get to the plant. Pruning and training plants fascinates me: correct cutting back produces an elegant structure and, counterintuitively, creates a more fruitful plant. I have black, red and white currants in containers and two years ago I had visions of these making a neatly managed soft fruit feature. They might struggle on - I have found cultivated red currant and gooseberry bushes on sites of former gardens there that must be close to 100 years old. In late October 2025, one of my granddaughters Isobel moved to the north of England and, as a result I was given her black cat (which I call Nemesis). As an unspayed female she ...

 1974 Age 35/36. My team at the English Tourist Board consisted of Bill Richards, Caroline Gillies, Jean Ashton, Pauline Martin, Jean Cuthbertson and Michael Dewing. This year I wrote a little booklet called The Mini-conference Market about, believe it ornot, mini-conferences at hotels. I think I also started the survey of the Wild Service Tree following a Botanical Society of the British Isles conference in Brighton. South East England was in the grip of a drought at Easter and there were many fires inplaces like Ashdown Forest during the school holiday period. In May I went to the Spalding Flower Festival with Margaret Blake on some sort oftourist board business. The town itself was very boring, so I borrowed Margaret’s carand went off on my own to a CAMRA pub down a remote dead end road leading into the Fens. When I arrived there at lunch time it was deserted and I had to call for service. I sat in the corner with a ham sandwich wondering how such a place had earned itsCAMRA re...

These notes were written fifty years ago and are my particularly significant as the ye@r our son Charles (Dobby) was born. 1975 Age 36/37 - from my notes. Early in 1975 we saw our old friend John Newbery, now living (rather unhappily we felt)in Bull Cottage, Battle. He had had a series of strange misfortunes. On one occasion he had been standing in front of a log fire when their had been a loud explosion and he collapsed to the ground.Apparently a tracer bullet had embedded itself in the tree, presumably during war time, and not gone off so the wood had grown round it and beenmissed when the logs were sawn. A piece of shrapnel went right through John’s chest, piercing his lung before coming out the other side. As he lay gasping for breath he had no idea what had happened. Fortunately he was quickly taken to hospital and recovered. A few months later,however, he got out of his car one dark night for a pee and fell into a deep roadside hole. There was a piece of corrugated iron in the bo...

4 November 2025. I have been going back over some of my old notes that I discovered after thinking they had been lost in cyberspace. They stretch back over 70 years and my challenge is how to annotate and present them. Some of the better standalone essays have been copied to my website: www.patrickroper.co.uk