Nothing changes!

Writing in The magazine of Horticulture, Botany and all useful discoveries in Rural Affairs in the USA in 1861, the editor, C.M. Hovey, writing about Cannas stated that "We have in our last volume alluded to the importance of ornamental-leaved plants for the decoration of the garden, which are now attracting so much attention abroad, particularly with the French and Belgian cultivators, whose climate is so much more like our own than that of Great Britain, where the sky is too cloudy and the temperature too cool to admit of that rampant growth which alone brings out the real beauty of these plants."

Nothing changes! We have just experienced at least two weeks of weather torment, with very little direct sunlight and instead of the gentle drizzle that we used to experience in England we now have vicious, hateful rain storms, spitting down vast volumes of water at harmful speeds. Being outside in such storms is almost like being physically attacked. But more important, we now never see the sun, it is almost always hidden behind vast rain-carrying clouds.

We had expected to have a good summer, after the promises made by the Met Office, instead it is almost worse than the last two years of misery. At Claines we have not had a barbecue for the last three years, as we haven't had the weather to allow us to light up and cook!

Something bad is happening to our climate, and our Cannas cannot cope with it. Even this years seedlings, which have not been in any contact with virus, are 80% showing leaves that the doomsayers will state is virus. Yet we know that no more than 4% of Canna seeds carry virus, unless we rubbish the work of Dr Koshoo, the only extensive scientific examination performed on the Canna genus, and we now assert that all seed carries its parents virus.

Every other genus accepts their specimens to have environment stress damage, but many advocates of virus in the Canna world insist that anything that is not perfect is virus! This is illogical and does not reflect biology and horticultural experience, where the many causes of stress are recognized and dealt with accordingly. The denial that there is such a thing as plant stress in Canna caused by climate is not going to allow us to move forward at all. Here ends my case my friends!