Autumnal colour - but from Dahlias?

For most of us the autumn means a splash of red, gold and yellow foliage, windy days and cool or frosty nights.

In Holland Park, however, it is the last gasp of riotous colour in the Napoleon Garden that catches my attention. This small corner is so-named as it once housed a bust of the famous emperor who was much admired by a previous Lady Holland. Sadly the bust disappeared and many an hour has been wasted trying to guess where in the park it might be buried. 

The colour I refer to is from the dahlias that flower so prolifically there late in the summer each year before being cut down by the frosts of the autumn. The display is no accident and from 2012, as a part of the official diamond jubilee celebrations of the park, the plants will be supplied by the National Dahlia Collection.

Dahlias are natives of Mexico, Central America and Colombia and were first recorded by European explorers in 1615 (Francisco Hernandez, published this record much later, though, in his book on medicinal plants in 1651) and again in 1787 by Nicolas-Joseph Thiery de Menonville while looking for cochineal insects. Named after Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist, seeds were sent back to Madrid and flowered in October 1789. These plants were called Dahlia coccinea and it is from them that Lord Bute obtained seeds to try growing in his garden in England. These failed.

The Dutch imported a box of roots around about this time and their sole surviving plant named Dahlia juarezii was crossed with the D. coccinea to produce a long line of hybrids that we now enjoy in our gardens today. 

A second species of dahlia - believed to be the dark petalled D. variabilis was successfully grown from Spanish seeds in 1804 by the head gardener in Holland House (now Park). 

Once only known and cultivated by the Aztecs for food and decoration, today we know of at least 36 species and on account of the dogged determination of garden plant breeders, enjoy a rich palette of dahlias. 

The Meredith Kercher case

Along with the rest of the world, it seemed, I watched the final minutes of the murder appeal in Perugia with alarm and morbid fascination.

I am alarmed by the apparent injustice of the Italian system which seems to arrive at the right verdict only after many years of judicial review. Four years is an awfully long time to imprison somebody and then decide that they were innocent after all. This has apparently been on almost a fast track.

I have felt for a long time that Amanda Knox along with her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were innocent and found the tension at the end almost unbearable. The story that was put out about their alleged sex games sounded just too implausible from the start.

The DNA tampering and shoddy investigation has echoes of the Madeline McCain disappearance in Portugal. The consequence: questions left unanswered and thought (if not fact) that somebody might have slipped through the net.

The arrival of Meredith Kercher's mother, brother and sister at the court on the final day appalled me. Their hastily called press conference and statement after the closing statements, the stories of million dollar book deals, lurid detail and the like, was designed by the prosecution to achieve just one thing: to swing the response of the jury away from the evidence back to an opinion based purely on emotion.

The family still hold to the idea - and that is all that is - that a second and possibly a third person was involved. That idea (with no supporting evidence at all) comes from the prosecution. Sadly they have not yet come to terms with that fact and until they do, until there is some other evidence now produced that actually proves this point, there will be no closure for them.

I feel the Italian prosecution service has destroyed more than just the reputations of the innocent parties here - the Kercher family will remain the victims of this appalling murder and seriously botched investigation. Meredith would clearly never have wished for this either. She, her family, the innocent parties (and their families) so wrongly accused and indeed the people of Italy deserve better.


And now we hear how the BBC has uncovered sufficient doubt in the Colin Norris case to almost certainly warrant a re-trial. Norris was convicted of murder as five very elderly and sick, diabetic women died whilst in his care from alleged insulin overdoses. It turns out this is neither an unnatural event nor rare condition in similarly infirm women and has occurred on other shifts in the Leeds Hospital where he worked. 


Another young person wrongly convicted of an awful crime due to shoddy investigation and aggressive "adversarial"  prosecution?