If this is your first time visiting this blog – don’t read this post! This one is just a lark around and won’t really help you with your garden. Read this post instead – why there is more to a great garden than plants.
Ok in last week’s blog post on modern contemporary gardens I said this week I would be going back to a normal blog post where you get to read something! Well, one part of that was right – the reading part. However, this is not the blog post I was expecting to write! In the meantime, I’ve been nominated for the honest scrap by Carole Brown from Ecosystem Gardening.
The honest scrap (odd title) the idea is I write 10 things about myself that you won’t already know by having read this blog and then I nominate seven people who I think are good eggs of the garden variety to do the same… Like Carole, this isn’t the type of thing I would normally do but seems like fun. Besides it would be wrong to turn Carole, the Ecosystem Gardener, down (a birder in her spare time). It’s always best not to upset women with big binoculars!
Here’s my list of 10 things you wouldn’t know about me from reading my blog:
1 ) I’m a Taurean. Enough said.
2 ) My favourite food is cheese. Pretty much any cheese, except the really smelly ones – I love. Nothing tastes like it, there is no substitute flavour, it has to be cheese.
3 ) I’m lactose intolerant – life is cruel.
4 ) It takes me an hour or two to fall asleep each night. I just have one of those brains without an off switch. No, I don’t want to meditate on it!
5 ) I’ve just started to learn Argentine Tango! It’s as close to an off switch as I can find – moving around a room, mostly backwards and with eyes closed, and not allowed to cling onto dance partner, does focus me and stops the mind buzz.
6 ) I was a very accident-prone child – think my mother is amazed I’ve made it to adulthood! Still occasionally prone (I haven’t mentioned this to the Argentine Tango people – they’ll soon discover it when we come to learn the leg flicks!).
Ok, I’m running out of things to tell you that isn’t embarrassing! Probably should have written that at point 5.
7 ) I cannot watch sad movies. Not too much upsets me in day to day life – put me in front of a movie or tv programme with any emotional content and I’ll be blubbering like a baby in no time. It’s very embarrassing – I try to disguise it in the cinema, pretending I’m flicking my hair out of my eyes, no one falls for it. Slightest sad point now and all my friends turn to see if I’m crying yet!
8 ) I am terminally curious – I have to understand how things work. I’m fascinated learning new things. Makes me somewhat of a sucker for internet marketers though – “Discover how using this simple but secret technique….” – yep they have seen me coming a mile off!
9 ) I don’t actually have a garden! Well I do but I’m not living anywhere near it – I’ve moved from Colchester (Britain’s oldest recorded town – its best claim to fame!) to the lovely city of Cambridge so I’m renting in the city centre until I sell my house and move here properly…
10 ) OK on to the final fact and this is possibly the most embarrassing – I get more questions about how this website is constructed than I do about gardens!! I’m offering FREE advice on how to make your garden nice and all people want to know about is the website!!
I’m not sure whether to be pleased or insulted. Either the website is so good, everyone wants to know how I did it or more realistically people are wondering how on earth someone with the computer knowledge of a grasshopper has managed to build a website! Hmph!
My list of very cool bloggers I’d like to know more about (yeah I’m nosy):
- Robin Plaskoff Horton – Urban Gardens Web
- Sheila Averbuch – Stopwatch Gardener
- Duncan Heather – Garden Guru
- Tim Matcham – Tim Matcham Garden Design
- Rebecca Sweet – Gossip in the Garden
- Jenny Peterson – J Peterson Garden Design
- Philip Voice – Landscape Juice
So guys and gals, I hope you are up for an honest scrap (or they could have called it 10 things you didn’t know about me and here are 7 of my favourite garden blogs – may be too long?).
Normal-ish service will be resumed next week. I say -ish because there will be a new monthly-ish feature starting – Inspirational Gardens and the people behind them, got a fabulous garden lined up for the first one. Can’t wait! And, finally, if you are all up for creating a beautiful garden of your own, check out our garden courses.
If you would like the Successful Garden Design cheat sheet and video on how to add the WOW factor to your garden please add your email address below (don’t worry we don’t spam and will NOT pass on your address to anyone else!).
10 replies to "The Honest Scrap Award!"
Rachel, you’re a good sport! Thanks for coming out to play for a little bit. It’s very, very sad to love cheese so much and also be lactose intolerant. I’m sorry! I will eat a lot of cheese and tell you all about it, how’s that? Heehee.
Rachel, we are alike on more than one of these points. Which ones will remain a secret – I’m not stating those online. Clearly you are braver than me!
No insult to your web skills, but many of those inquiries about how you did the site could be SPAM. At least I get a lot of SPAM comments where people try to tell me that my site isn’t working, or claim they want to link to me, or congratulate me on my site and ask how I did it. I could be totally wrong on that though…
Yeah thanks Carole that will help no end!! ;o)
Alison, you have me intrigued now! No, thankfully not spammers – askimet takes care of those – these are real live people emailing me and telling me about their plans. Which is nice – just not the sort of advice I was expecting to give! I think it’s because people have seen the site develop so much over the past few months, they are intrigued to know how it all happened.
Hi Rachel! I, too, suffer from the complete inability to fall asleep quickly…I lay there watching my husband’s head barely hit the pillow as he’s sound asleep, while I’m ‘just getting started’ thinking for the next hour! Too bad we live in such different time zones or we could ‘tweet’ ourselves to sleep!! Thanks for nominating me for this post – I hope I offer some interesting points and don’t let you down!
Hi Rebecca – excellent! Glad you are going to take up the challenge, I look forward to reading yours.
Don’t get me started on other halves that can drop off to sleep in a nanosecond – it’s worse than people that can eat as much cheese as they like! Creative minds never sleep!
Rachel you’re a much better sport than I am because I’m not going to get that personal on my blog…but just so I can look as interesting as you look, I will in fact reveal that 1) I am learning Dutch, 2) I am reading “Six Pixels of Separation” and 3) I hate the scent of sweet peas. This is naughty of me not to participate, I know, but I don’t want to have to lay it on someone else, so would like the buck to stop with me. Still, enjoyed learning more about you!
One of your ten appears on my list too… so which is it?
Find out soon…
Tim – you tease! I look forward to finding out which one… I’ve got you down for a secret Argentine Tangoer!
Shelia – learning Dutch, lovely language to learn, not so easy on the vocal cords through! I spent a couple of summers living in Holland in my yoof, loved it…
[…] 31, 2010 in Uncategorized Rachel Mathews kindly awarded me this hugely prestigious title. Never heard of it I hear you cry – well no […]
[…] are getting back to gardens this week after the frivolity of last week’s Honest Scrap Award. This is the first of a new monthly-ish feature on inspirational gardens. I’ve chosen this […]