THE recent meeting started with chairman Sandra Alder thanking all those who helped the society achieve a profit of £300 at the April jumble sale.

Unfortunately, not many people turned up to hear Mr Pope give an illustrated talk on gardening through the ages, presented with a humorous slant.

Mr Pope is a member of the Solihull Horticultural Society and for his talk he started 3,500 years ago in summer with gardens around oases and travelled up to the present day via Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome and early British and European developments in garden design.

With many slides, he was able to show where concepts such as landscape gardening, the grand parks, and cottage gardens originated and how many features in modern gardens are simply extensions of ideas that were developed in much earlier times.

As well as this, Mr Pope used many attractive slides of plants and gardens to explain how the introduction into England of many plants was combined with an extensive range of native plants to create the basis for the splendours that exist today in so many colourful and dramatic gardens.

The next meeting at the Peace Hall will be at 8pm on Thursday, May 8, when Duncan Coombs talks on Climbers and Wall Shrubs.