pond talk

This a late post, and will probably be a short one, as I'm tired, and if I spend long over it then by the time I press Publish it will be tomorrow's.  I was out earlier this evening, doing my pond talk.  I could have blogged before going out, but it was a nice afternoon, and after spending the first half of the morning mugging up on the talk I was busy doing the garden.

The talk went OK.  Or rather, it went well in that they seemed to enjoy it, but I miscalculated the timing and over-ran.  That can happen to the best of people.  I've seen Roy Lancaster go on beyond his allotted slot until he was rudely cut off before he'd got through all his material (a miscalculation by the organisers, I thought, since what Roy Lancaster had to say about plants was much more interesting than what the RHS apparatchik had to say about the RHS).  I was not cut off, nor did any of my audience leave the hall or go to sleep, but it's still disappointing not to manage to keep to the timetable.  I have to console myself with the thought that it was the first time I'd done the talk to an audience, and it's very difficult to be certain of how the time will work out live when you've only been through it in your head.

It's also a relief to have got the first run out of the way, given that a month ago while I had plenty of ideas I had no script, no slides and not much firm data.  Ponds are (is?) a big topic, if you include the aesthetics of how they might fit into a designed landscape and the nuts and bolts of building and maintaining one.  Liners, levels, filters, fountains, fish or no fish, oxygenating plants, invasive species of oxygenating plants (now banned by Defra), there's a lot to think about.  I say the first run, as things stand the world premiere could be the only performance, but some other garden club might like to know about ponds at some point.  The first run went well enough that I'd be happy offering it to other clubs, now I know to tighten up on the timing.

Anyway, that was ponds.  Time to press Publish before it turns into Wednesday.