h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i live in a part of the world where no one has to plant forests. Just leave your fields and wetlands alone for thirty years, and Nature will do all the work. Then you just need to not intrude very often.

When my father built our family home, the land was an abandoned orchard between two swamps. The house went on the highest point of land, propped up on a man-made four-foot rise so that our cellar floor would be above the water table. We had very few floods over the years.

Some of neighbors owned land that had reverted to forest, or were on their way there. In the 1960s I would follow our brook upstream and find a whole area filled with Lady Slippers
http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/cypripedium/index.shtml

Imagine hundreds of pink and/or yellow flowers bunched together on grassy knolls. Sadly, these flowers are long gone. I suspect climate change has pushed their preferred habitats farther north. A few years ago I saw some on the slopes of the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

One species that is still going strong on my family's land is skunk cabbage. Desopite the skunklike odor, I am rather fond of these plants
http://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Plants-and-Fungi/Skunk-Cabbage
The cabbage-like leaves are attractive, and the flowers are nice as well.

One woodland plant that seldom gets much notice is the Maianthemum (the literal English translation is Mayflower).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maianthemum_canadense
You have almost certainly seen a cousin of the Maianthemum Canadense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_of_the_valley
Either plant can be verlooked, as the leaves are so low to the ground, and the berries don't stand out. You can find them in deeply shaded areas like the ground around evergreen trees. They never stay lonely for long, though. If they like their habitat, the rhizomes sprerad underground and produce new shoots. One plant can cover an area 30 by 40 feet this way.

Fire fighters (firemen as we call them) over here, in some parts of the country are now getting stones and assorted missiles etc thrown at them when attending fires either buildings or cars etc.
Society gone mad

In Greek myth, there was an enchantress named Alcina, who turned people into plants. The people who throw stones at fire fighters would be more useful to society as plants than as people, don;t you think?

we have a lot in this country Paul, who are two braincells behind a plant

I will leave it to you and your local bee population what to do with them.

from Star Trek - space, the final frontier!
Yep! True for space exploration

But for many that's the gap between their ears

It used to be said that if you couldn't do anything useful, you could serve as a bad example. Nowadays there's an additional option: serve as a guinea pig in a scientific study.

You say that there are people near you who seem to have very few brain cells. They would be ideal candidates for a study. The human genome doesn't throw off many people who are completely hopeless. Therefore, something interferes with these people's ability to use what gifts they do have. Was their education minimal or downright destructive? Did their families discourage them from thinking for themselves?

Please keep in mind that your neighbors and countrymen look heroic to those of us on the side of the ocean. They did as they were told by Churchill and his successors, and the reward was a continuation of your way of life. Maybe obedience was part of the problem: it was
the solution to an existential threat many years ago, and then conditions changed. Maybe some other quality is needed now, but obedience is too ingrained to allow for more flexible behavior.

Have you ever seen "To the manor born?" We Americans don't have to worry about who will inherit some dukedom here, because we haven't got any. It's hard for us to imagine what a House of Lords is like. These parts of the British way of life seem like something in a fantasy.

I tell you what: send us some Dukes, and we'll send you trump.

Dont do it, !

There are only 31 dukes so not a fair deal - even if it includes your entire royal house

I believe one Trump is worth at least 42 dukes

I remember the good old days when there were thirteen trumps, and if you had enough of them, you could take a few extra tricks when you were playing bridge.

Indeed. The trump you have now is no good at bridges but sadly keen on building walls. All kinds of walls

Paul, there ARE many folk here who have brains etc and do they're bit for the country. But there's also a lot who think everybody else owes them a favour and do not believe in a fair days pay for a fair days workTHEY want the money, but not prepared to earn it as such