One of the simple pleasures here is to head in to work for some overtime on Shabbat when the religious shut up shop and everything goes quiet. The gardens are virtually empty and no one is disturbed when I spend a few hours in the quarantine house p****ng out ( haha the website censors that word... my horticultural friends will get a chuckle) juvenile ferns to the melodies of Guns and Roses. Air guitar however can be a dangerous past time, for ferns at least, a guitar solo here a fern flies there and so on…

Na made that last bit up and my p****ng out is as surgically precise as ever but I will miss getting into the greenhouses with some tunes when I leave. There are some things I won't miss too and after avoiding the news for the most part, for the time I have been here, I have relented amidst the escalating tensions you may have heard about. It's very interesting to put together news, opinions and what I have seen. It's no secret I chose to come to a place renowned for conflict and as a boiling pot for numerous religions, you wouldn't expect otherwise.

With that impartial and somewhat uninformative update I will bid you farewell again and finish with a revelation from the travels:

No matter what the geopolitical setting, plant people are pretty much the same around the world… but by no means is everyone who works with plants, a plant person….