A rose by any other name

23 Nov 08, 1.23pm
The firework season gets in the way of the gardening season, so it's only now that I'm able to get to work on the flower beds and greenhouse. One task involves cutting down and bringing in my Canna lily collection. These underrated and hard-to-find plants produce a spectacular blaze of late summer colour. Their long stems and explosion of orange and red blooms resemble the firework trail and burst of a lift of comet-tailed shells. Gardening and a love of fireworks seem to go together. I know my colleague at Kimbolton Fireworks, the Rev Ron Lancaster, to be a keen gardener, and so too was another scion of the fireworks industry, the late Chris Philip, who catalogued garden plants. It's a shame I couldn't copyright the name Fantastic Fireworks, otherwise I could charge a royalty on all the clematis, geraniums and roses which carry our name!