• DECEMBER is generally a quiet month. Probably the only one in the year, so enjoy yourself, make the most of it! A good time to reflect on your achievements of the past growing season. And the failures! Go over your notes again to refresh your memory and endeavour not to repeat your mistakes in the forthcoming year. Always aim to make improvements and set yourself some challenges to add spice to the new season.
  
• The ideal time to just relax perusing the various catalogues of the Specialist Fuchsia Nurseries. They do a truly fantastic job keeping such a fast range of cultivars in existence and they need our full support to stay in business. Be ruthless discard some of your old plants, the ones that never seem to do well for you. Most nurseries have some exciting new introductions or you could finally get around to acquiring those cultivars that attracted your attention at last years shows. Maybe even get a few hardies to create that hardy bed that you always promised yourself. You could start a collection of a certain types or in your favourite colour range. The possibilities are numerous and the new plants, plus the inspiring advice that goes with them on collection, really set the adrenaline going again. Pondering about what to go for can also fill in many otherwise dull winter hours.     
  

Due to the revamping of St Nicholas Gardens The Dinosaur Coast Garden Pride Exhibition was sited in a marquee on the West Pier. The imaginative display, described in the promotional literature as "a stunning 3-D prehistoric landscape recreated in flowers and plants", featured dinosaurs set in a jungle scene of vibrant coloured marigolds, celosias, etc interspersed with cordylines and yuccas as dot plants. A total of 10,000 individual plants were used to create the exhibitions and each of the dinosaurs took around 30 hours to make. They were constructed of steel frames, wrapped in wire mesh and stuffed with special compost and planted up with many hundreds of plantlets of alternathera versicolour. 95% of the plants were grown at the Council's own nursery at Manor Road which has a state-of-the-art greenhouse complex and grows about half a million plants annually for the Borough's parks and gardens.
The time and effort spent on constructing the exhibits was well worth while though, as over 27.000 visitors, young and old alike, admired them. Beautiful water features and special effects like the roaring sound of dinosaurs and stunningly lit up areas enhanced the display, sponsored by local businesses like Sweeting Engineering, P&L Sound & Lighting, Draper Tools and Campbells of Malton. More collaboration with Wykeham Trees ensured height was lent to the display by some beautiful specimen trees supplied by them and R.V. Rogers of Pickering supplied the ferns. In keeping the plants included Jurassic Ginkgo biloba (Maidenhair Tree), Dicksonia antartica (Soft Tree Fern) and Cycads!
I wouldn't go as far as our local Scarborough Evening News which proclaimed the exhibition to be "better than the Chelsea Flower Show", but it was certainly extremely good. I especially liked the area where an