It’s bloody freezing outside. The snow melted and froze into ice, and then it snowed on top of the ice, which melted a bit, and now it’s freezing outside. Not good. Time then, for a little ray of sunshine.

But before that, some outstanding business to wrap up. Last week saw the inaugural Drooling Vegetable competition, and my underlings are still picking through the postbag. Some heroic suggestions, along with some truly awful gags from Mal, and a discovery that in the States the swede is known as Rutabaga.

The winner, though, is Amy, for her identification of a whole page of swede recipes, and in particular the Indian Spiced Swede Cakes.  Hurrah!

Anyway, back to the sunshine. Back at the beginning of October I had a day off and took myself off to Chelsea Physic Garden. I’d read about it for ages but never quite managed to visit.

It’s a little garden square just over the road from the Thames, founded in 1673, and dedicated to growing medicinal herbs and plants. It’s also only open four days a week, nowhere near a tube station and ringed by traffic wardens. Unsurprisingly, when you finally get there you’ll find it’s quite quiet.

It’s £8 to get in, which when you cost it up as a price per square metre of garden probably makes it the most expensive garden in Britain. It’s also full of posh old people. I know! Posh people in Chelsea! I was gobsmacked!

You do get a handset with your admission, which has a commentary narrated by John Snow, but most importantly, it has a very nice café, staffed by some more posh people, and selling a range of very tasty cakes.

Now you may have noticed that this is a gardening blog, and we’ve got this far into a post about a garden, and there’s nothing mentioned about the…um…actual garden. Well, truth be told I didn’t find it that inspiring. Yes, the setting was beautiful, the beds were packed full of plants and the labels suggested they were all hugely important or extremely rare, but as a visual spectacle (shallow, shallow me) it didn’t really do it for me.

Still, nice cakes. And full of posh people.

On the ipod while adjusting the monocle: Pulp / Common People.  I said pretend you’ve got no money. She just laughed and said “well how are we going to get into the garden then?”