HTA conference gossip - Kensington Roof Gardens, owned by Richard Branson and filled with the great and good of the garden industry last week, plus John Sargent, John McCarthy and me.

1. Scotts' John Ashley set a ball rolling at the Garden Futures event at Kensington Roof Gardens by saying there are loads of ladies now running garden organisations: They start with HTA new president Caroline Owen, HTA vice president Carol Paris, IGCA chief Sue Allen, Gardenex's Amanda Sizer Barrett, Cabe's Sarah Gaventa, RHS's Inga Grimsey (what price on a female replacement?), HW's own Kate Lowe, BALI's Sandra Loton-Jones, BPOA/NFU's Sarah Fairhurst, NFU's Sarah Pettit, GCA's Gillie Westwood, IoH's Heather Barrett-Mold, SGD's Annabel Downs. Can you think of more? Does this mean anything? Probably just a sign of (equality) times?

2. Met Mike Gilbert, ex Hammond Phillips. He said he is aiming to help £250,000-500,000 turnover garden centres sell themselves through the internet.

3. Talked to Roof Gardens gardener David Lewis with Boningale's Tim Edwards. Tim is training as a dancer (tango) and getting into green roofs. David is an ex adman and a good gardener to talk to.

4. Was last at the bar with Andrew Richardson, David Norman and Simon Fraser.

5.  Missed former hostage John McCarthy's speech. Lent him a fiver in 1987. Didn't see him again for five years, someone joked.

6. Asked John Sargent want he thought of John and Edward. He said: "Wrong programme".

7. During the Celebrity Come Dancing star and ex BBC political reporter's speech incoming GCA chair Martin Stewart was playing phone tag on James Barnes and Dennis Espley, calling them sneakily so they hurriedly had to turn their phones off when they rang and interrupted Sargent.

8. Some cruel person asked crutch-bound HTA events person Sam Gunston to get more chairs. She fell off shoulders at a Bon Jovi gig I hear.

9. Glee and Garden Expo were signing up companies to exhibit at 2010's rival events.

10. Delegates from Homebase squirmed as speakers took shots against DIYs. Lots of 'we're green' speeches too. Worryingly, some speakers said garden centres were automatically environmentally sound in their very essence. Others said peat transportation was as big an environmental issue as digging it up. Some delegates said cut product ranges while agreeing that they needed to be different from DIYs/supermarkets, which have narrow gardening ranges. Everyone agreed prices should go up and that garden centres have beaten the recession. As Dobbies' James Barnes said: "We're the Obama of retail!"

1. James Steele-Sargent has just worked on gardens for Chris Evans, and Billie Piper. Evans was grumpy. Billie was lovely but looked a bit rough in the mornings. She wanted a pig pen.

2. Britain’s most popular TV gardener? Nigel Slater.

3. Alan Titchmarsh made compost with Kelvin McKenzie and Julie Peasgood last week on Titch’s new ITV afternoon chat series. Titchmarsh’s new book, Knave of Spades, ends with a poem, in which AT calls himself a “sex god” (tongue ‘firmly in cheek’ no doubt). He also uses the verb ‘toddle’ to describe his mode of locomotion. Titch says in a recent Guardian iv “I grew up in a family in Yorkshire”.

4. Forgot to say last week that in the Royal Parks half marathon I beat Linford Christie…’s niece Rachel. Miss England.

5. My colleague got a call from a PR the other week asking if anyone could knock out an allotment book in a month. Jez Abbott finished the tome in a fortnight.

6. Ex RHS bod Matthew Wilson says Channel 4 are keen on a second series of Landscape Man. Unless only one ma and his dog watch it. Which is quite possible considering there have been no successful gardening series since Groundforce. Go on, name one. James Wong-ok, maybe.

7. Things are hotting up ahead of the annual pumpkin competition at the allotment. This will be the boy William’s first Halloween. Good year for pumpkins.

8. The Royal London Society for the Blind is having a charity bowling event in the City at the beginning of December and is looking for a gardening service as a prize. It’s mostly commodity traders – Barclays Wealth Management, Credit Suisse, Fortis etc etc and an ideal prize would be an introductory garden makeover. I suggested Jack Dunckley.

11. Monty Don says the BBC would not let him film Gardener’s World at his own garden and they had to do it in a carpark (Berryfields) instead. Untrue says BBC insiders. Don would not let the BBC film at his pad for privacy reasons. Most people think GW was better when it came from a real garden and not an old football field (Greenacres).

1. My latest Daily Telegraph piece starts a ball rolling on a reassessment of Christopher Lloyd. Stephen Anderton is writing a book. Andrew Wilson says Lloyd was rude. Anne Wareham says the Great Dixter gardener's planting was a "rather incoherent muddle". When Wilson was speaking about Christo at Wimbledon literary festival June Whitfield walked by looking like a cross between my Mum and Vera Lynn. My mate Big Ste once performed a song about Terry and June that went: "Terry and June, Terry and June, Terry is fat like a balloon."

2. A sign of times replacing is that that a consumer show aimed at the expanding allotment market hopes to attract 12,000 visitors and 100 trade stands to Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire next 19-21 March. RASE is backing it-the society used to run the Royal Show. Another grow your own, or as the industry calls it, grow it yourself show, is on at Loseley Park in May. I suppose shows are about cashing in on new markets.

3. Talking of which, the Garden Expo and Glee are set to fight it out over sign-ups for the big show for garden centre people. Trade bodies are taking sides.

4. This summer I spoke to the designer of Liverpool Football Club's struggling defender and captain Jamie Carragher. I had asked him if he had any famous clients. He said Jamie Carragher. He said he gets jobs by word of mouth. I said you done any other footballers gardens? He said no.

5. Lookalikes. Will Parsons/Alan Carr. Ben Fogle. Mr Potatohead. Beat Fogle in Royal Parks half marathon on Sunday. And Chester the squirrel.

6. I was amused that one commentator said my top 100 garden centres piece had chosen only middle-class garden centres for inclusion on the website Gardenforum. They said we'd missed Gordon Rigg (who had a fire at the weekend-unrelated to top 100) out. Maybe. Sorry-will include next time. But this was clearly a chippy northerner with a chip on his shoulder. Takes one to know one. At least I have a chip on both shoulders-I'm well-balanced.

7. Another person asked on the same website what my criteria was. I suggested asking me. Took a lot of investigation to draw up the feature. So why not ask me how I did it if you want to know?

8. Troy at Bodnant reinvented himself at the Welsh garden (now on BBC2) after shortlived spell at RHS Hyde Hall. I remember Stephen Anderton berating me for chasing this up too hard.

9.RHS-who should get the job? Good communicator with hort knowledge and commercial experience. These are some names-all happy in their current roels and I have no knowledge of their applying...Andy McIndoe, Gordon Rae, David Gwyther, Martin Breddy, Gordon Seabright, Simon Thornton-Wood, Stephen Bennett, Donald Hearne (ex RHS sec, now bursar Clare college-was up for job when Colquhoun got it), Richard Jackson, James Barnes, Ed Conroy, Nicholas Marshall. My money's on third banana at some biggish charity with a background in marketing and an interest in their own back garden.

10.Monty Don: “I cry all the time, most recently two days ago when I realised the housemartins had gone away.

“I have a jacket that I which I bought 24 years ago at a shop Paul Smith used to have off Floral Street in London. I feel more like me when I am wearing it than when I am not.”

“Last night I dreamt of a large black woman and I having sex.”

Look out for this in Private Eye.

11. Bumped into Alys Fowler at Garden History Museum the other day. Her new series will be shot partly in Super 8. 

12. Penshurst Place in Tonbridge, Kent has unveiled a sculpture to mark the centenary this year of the birth of William 1st Viscount De L’Isle VC KG (the previous owner of Penshurst Place). His grandson, Robert Rattray, has sculpted a metal sundial in the form of a life-size archer, which was unveiled in the Demi Lune in the public gardens last week.

 The theme for the sundial is the quotation:

“Who shoots at the midday sun, though he shall be sure he shall never hit the mark;

 yet as sure as he is he shall shoot higher than who aim but at a bush”

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

The Honourable Philip Sidney, son of the current Viscount De L’Isle, has written a sonnet, which accompanies the statue:

Duty took a bow, aimed at the sun

And loosed a shaft across a century:

For eighty-one years, valorous, alone

It flew through gathering clouds of history.

It flew through beachhead fires at Dunkirk,

Through cordite fog at Anzio, through the mist

At Canberra, that rose up Naiad-like

Beside the lake, its every touch a kiss,

Continues..

And came to rest at Penshurst. Now, as we

Wonder at its sublime trajectory,

Leaving to us the new paths to be made.

The skies are less clear now, but still they’re ours:

Though in a quiver, let’s shoot for the stars.

Philip Sidney (1985- )