Started off in the recently refurbished main café where we were greeted by a large ceiling ornament made out of kitchen utensils, which last would have cost a fair bit in a kitchen shop. But a good place, which led me to wonder this morning about centrally planned economies, given that my belief is that the catering at Wisley has all been let out to a catering contractor, a contractor who can bring much more skill & capital to the operation than the garden enthusiasts who run the place as a whole. Would a centrally planned economy have been able to organise catering operations in quite this way? And even if it had, would the dead hand of bureaucracy stifled the spirit of free enterprise needed to make a go of it? I associate this morning to CISCO which once brought food to hungry bureaucrats across the land and to their sackfuls of records which I once came across dumped in some shed somewhere. Once an appanage of the Treasury, but I doubt now whether they could have risen to the catering at Wisley on Monday, even in their hey-day. Although to be fair, the standard of public food has risen a lot in the last twenty years.
On the day I was thinking more of the fact that Wisley is a large public park in private hands and which operates without subsidy or public money; another tribute to the spirit of free enterprise. At around a million visitors a year, one for each square meter of gardens (including the many retail & catering outlets), four times the size of the nearby Polesden Lacey operation, an operation which is only one step removed from being a nationalised industry.
On exit from elevenses, we were very struck by the Korean dogwood, in full and flashy flower, from a distance the small trees looking a bit like hawthorn in full flower, but not like that at all closer too. They did not photograph well, so I offer a snap of their label instead.
Pushing on, we found that the place was more or less at its flowery peak, with all kinds of strange and wonderful plants on show. Intensely blue delphiniums. Intensely yellow something else, possibly eschscholzia californica, the state flower of California, probably a native of Mexico. Rose gardens at full throttle, including the odd 'Peace' rose of the last post, but I was struck on this occasion by the much simpler white & pink climbing roses, much more like a dog rose in flower than a floribunda.
Some of the lawns had been mowed in fancy patterns. Not really my thing and I think I would have thought of something else to do with all the extra man hours thereby expended.
Just three mistakes. One was a mound, the top of which was reached by two spiral paths lined with cordon apple trees. Good view from the top, but I think the mound was far too dry for the comfort of the apple trees. Two was a pair of otherwise fine flower beds tricked out with Alice-in-Wonderland brightly painted, wooden accessories which they would have been much better without. Three was a summer fair, luckily only advertised rather than present. But it is a judgement call: gardens as flashy as Wisley are expensive and it must be hard to strike the right balance between a botanical garden and a world of adventures.
Back to the café for sausage and mash (unusually garnished with cold onions of the sort used to decorate hog dogs at fairs), served by a young man who looked rather the worse for wear, as if he was already counting the days before he could go back to college, and from thence to take a quick peek at the books being sold off by the library next door. Among various books which we had once owned, I was pleased to find one which we had not, the memoir of a journey through the fringes of China & Tibet by one André Migot and translated by Peter Fleming. A journey made shortly before I was born, so a conception if not a birthday book,.
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