Website People
The Moosey website is about four P's - Plants, Pets, Places, and People. Relatives, friends, and other gardeners (much more famous than the Head Gardener will ever be) are often mentioned.
Occasionally a reader must be perplexed - who exactly is this 'walking friend'? And who is this David Austin? Some man who has all these 'beauties'?
Relatively Speaking...
Relatives of Moosey are usually given their proper family title - namely Daughter of Moosey, Younger Son of Moosey, and Elder Son of Moosey, AKA Web-Master.
NGP :- NGP is responsible for irrigation, fences, pumps, and all constructions in the garden.
Non-Gardening-Partner of Moosey is given various descriptive names - Lawn-Mower Man and Resident Engineer being two of the most commonly used. It all depends on what he's supposed to be doing at the time of writing. Chain-Saw Man is common, after a winter storm. But most of the time he gets abbreviated to NGP.
Relatives are taken rather for granted, and are rarely pictured in any of the website sections. After all, family life is supposed to be private...
Human Friends :- Human friends play a huge part in a gardener's life - as well as cats and dogs.
So here is a glossary of VIFs (very important friends) and VIGs (very important gardeners) who feature in other pages on the Moosey web-site. Some might be seen shyly posing in a photograph, while others are allowed to retain their anonymity - a lot of very private people end up in this very public place!
Very Important Friends - VIFs
Friends have their anonymity shyly protected - and so you'll read about Moosey's 'walking friend', 'singing friend', 'swimming friend', and so on. These friends (if they know they feature at all) graciously allow themselves to be mentioned in web pages.
Judith :- Judith's house has a number of its own cats, as well as foster-kittens rescued from the colony.
In 2007, being retired and having some spare time, I asked my friend Judith if I could help with her Trap-Neuter-Return programme for controlling a colony of wild cats.
Judith has been feeding the cats and kittens every day for over four years. She's just an ordinary animal lover who's doing something small yet significant in her neighbourhood. Trap-Neuter-Return is a well documented humane way of dealing with a feral cat population.
Astrid :- Astrid (on the left) is my swimming friend, and also my sea-side gardening friend.
Astrid is my oldest friend, and gardens in a micro-climate by the sea in Christchurch, New Zealand. She prefers not to have a relationship with computers - so she knows nothing of my web-site, or my journals. Yet she was my inspiration for starting a paper gardening journal all those years ago!
Astrid introduced me to mulch, and daylilies. Thanks, my friend!
Other friends, too, make huge contributions to my garden. There's Sherryn, my singing friend, who supplies me with 'chook cook' - frozen bags of vegetable peelings, which I boil up for the hens. Being an alto, she is a woman with a trailerful of down-to-earth common sense. She instinctively understands why I keep needing her old newspapers.
Very Important Gardeners - VIGs
Then there are some official characters - grand gardeners Moosey has never met but is inspired by. Such celebrities will often be tossed into the turbulent waters of the Moosey journal, to bob along in the current of words for a week or so, and then float off under Rooster Bridge off the property.
My Gertrude Jekyll Book :- I like Gertrude Jekyll's rather quaint sayings.
A VIG who I enjoy reading is the famous English lady gardener Gertrude Jekyll. Her books are interesting to read today, and I find her very quotable.
Beth Chatto is another VIG - an English lady gardener who has an open garden, and also writes inspiring books. Her dry gravel garden (which used to be a car-park) is famous, though I've never been myself to see it. She was one of the first garden authors that I read and reread, and took notes from.
Very Important Rose Breeders - VIRBs
David Austin and Sam McGredy are both VIRBs, and are mentioned a lot in the website. Millions of Older-Lady Gardeners (OLGAs) have filled their rose gardens with David Austin's romantic English roses.
David Austin Roses :- English roses have beautiful colour, form and fragrance.
David Austin has a great philosophy, wanting to combine the health and vigour of the modern rose with the fragrance and form of the old-fashioned. It seems to me the perfect compromise between old and new. His fluffy pastels are just perfection.
Sam McGredy's a closer-to-home VIRB. There are a few Sam McGredys - the most junior one is a well-known rose breeder who emigrated from Ireland to New Zealand in the 1970s. There are three pages of Sam McGredy's roses in my New Zealand roses section.
Sam McGredy Roses :- Sexy Rexy is a delightful shade of pink.
Sam is the breeder who defied tradition and called one of his roses Sexy Rexy. Important warning - promise that you will never, ever do a Google search for this rose by name!