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

Hello Sasha. I've been given your entry about Garden Heliotropes to sub edit (but you probably know that already from the Sub-editor board). The working entry is here A87797876

I've made a few minor edits so far - it looks as if there's actually very little editing that needs to be done. I wonder if you'd consider adding something in the entry about the origin of the name - that the flowers follow the sun across the sky and the Greek word for sun is helios? I think it would work well in the second paragraph of the introduction.

Very nice entry

Thanks Gosho

In the definition of Perennial, I was puzzled by the mention of "two years" specifically, but when I looked up several definitions, I understood it. Can the footnote be changed to "Plants that live longer than one year", or "Plants that live for several years", since we're only distinguishing them from Annuals and have made no mention of Biennials?

I didn't mention the origin of the name, as the flowers don't follow the sun across the sky! I could maybe say something about that as well, but I decided not to originally - let me know what you think.

Thanks

I'll bow to your superior knowledge of the subject, and I have indeed found one or two pieces that introduce some doubt as to whether Heliotrope flower clusters follow the sun, but the vast majority say they do. Perhaps if you explained the Greek origin of the word, but with a note of doubt to the notion, it might encourage a reader or two to go out and buy some Heliotropes and experiment

I think 'several years' would work best.

Yes, I agree 'several years' is best.

I did some more research into the name, and I think what it is is that "heliotrope" is a genus of around 250 species, and many of them will have flowers that follow the sun, but this species is not one of them (as the flower heads are so large, the whole plant has a job to support them, never mind move them around).

Therefore, I prefer not to mention the origin of the name, as it would sit better in an Entry about the genus rather than this specific plant.

Ah, with you now. Okey dokey.

Morning!

I've popped up here to ask if there was any chance of a photo?

If not let us know and they will 'sort something else out'

But it would be nice if you had something...you get a credit and everything!

Email to: artists at h2g2 dot com

Thanks....

Rosie

Thanks Gosho

Hi Rosie

As planned, I did manage to get a flowering heliotrope at the end of June, so some photos are winging their way to you in just a moment!

arrived and looking pretty

thanks

Can I ask you about the part of the entry that talks about essential oil from the flowers, Sasha? All the research I've done says that heliotropin, which is the source of the cherry pie/vanilla note in heliotrope perfumes and scents, isn't found in the Heliotrope plant and extracting oil from the flowers has proved impossible. Heliotrope macerations and absolutes are on the market but they're not the same as an essential oil, even though some websites call it that; other websites include Heliotrope in their list of fake essential oils. We can work around it but we should be accurate in our descriptions.

I've done a little more work on the entry so take a look at it and let me know if there are any problems. I added a footnote about starting the seeds indoors on a windowsill.

Thanks Gosho - still looks good

I just can't remember where I read about the essential oils, though - I don't think I made it up (as I don't really know what essential oils are) but I can't find where the sentence came from...

How about "a perfume created to evoke the flowers' fragrance"?

Thanks

Hi Gosho

My Firefox has gone funny again, and I just happened to look at the Entry and discovered the dreaded question marks in black squares again - when you added in the Farenheit, did you use ° for the degree symbol?

I'm going to be picky about a few of the changes I spotted you made now...

I think it's funny to have the Farenheit correct to 1 decimal place when the Celsius is to the nearest degree - I think 36°F will be accurate enough.

I don't think it's correct to say that Heliotropes can usually be bought at garden centres - I think "often" is a better word, as I really struggled to find them this year because they're not in fashion at the moment.

I also don't see what was wrong with my sentence "you should never have a shortage of Heliotrope plants if you want them in your garden every summer." - people are under no obligation to grow them after reading my Entry...

Lastly, I would prefer "the plant is not good enough to eat" to be put back again, as I think that is a common phrase - "smelled good enough to eat".

Thanks

Created to evoke the fragrance - good idea

I think it's quite common, when converting temperatures, to use a decimal place on the converted figure, but maybe that's because I read a lot of meteorological websites. I'll round it up.

The sentence about garden centres sounded odd with 'often', and it doesn't sound much better with 'usually', but I didn't want to change your entry too much. Giving it a qualification seems unnecessary so I think it'd be best to take the word out altogether and just say "Heliotropes can be bought at garden centres". An entry should be as timeless and as wide-ranging as possible on points like this, and if they're not fashionable now they might be in a few years, or they might be popular in one part of the country/world but not in another. We don't really need to tell readers that sometimes they can get them, sometimes they can't.

I changed 'plants' to 'blooms' in that sentence because if the plants are perennials they're going to be there all year round, even if the stems die back in winter which I guess wouldn't be the case if they're being used for hedging, but the blooms only come in summertime, and if they're being grown as annuals it'll be primarily for the flowers, so it seems right to focus on the blooms there. If we change it back to 'plants' the sentence should probably lose "every summer". I moved the sentence to the end of the paragraph because it fits better there, but I'll let the Eds know about this when I hand the entry back to them.

'Good enough to eat' doesn't work in that sentence because the word 'enough' turns it into a quantitative statement and it doesn't come across as the familiar saying, which is usually associated with looking rather than smelling. We don't often say that something 'smells good enough to eat' because it almost always is. It needs something else to give it a reference point, an anchor. Try it now. Personally I'd put single quotes around 'good enough to eat' to emphasise that it's being used as the saying rather than (or as well as) advice to the reader, but I think it works as is.

In the section about propagating from cuttings I changed 'stems' to 'sections of stems'. Is that correct? That's how I remember Geoff Hamilton (Bob rest his soul) doing it on Gardeners World whenever he was propagating from stem cuttings. And to avoid confusion about watering, because 'regularly' is a bit vague, I repeated your advice about not waterlogging it.

I'm not having any problems with the degree symbol in my browsers (Firefox and Opera), but your 36°F is showing up as just that, rather than the symbol, for me. Do we do that in entries? I'm very new to subbing, although not writing entries. Are we supposed to do that for every symbol?

I've changed 'many years' to 'since the 19th Century' to give it a bit more definition. As far as I've been able to find out it was introduced to gardens some time in the 18th.

When writing gardening/plant-related entries (as I've done in the past) you have remember that we have readers south of the equator so I've tweaked the entry in two places to reflect that.

Y'know, whenever I work on this entry I can smell cherry pie!

Hi Gosho

Thanks for your message. I appreciate discussing this in detail

"We don't really need to tell readers that sometimes they can get them, sometimes they can't."

Why not? Isn't it better than telling them they can when they can't...?

"I changed 'plants' to 'blooms' in that sentence"

Sorry for not being clear - I didn't particularly object to the changing of plants to blooms, but my point was that I objected to the removal of the "if you want them".

"'Good enough to eat' doesn't work in that sentence"

I like the italics on the 'not'. How about "All parts of the plant are poisonous, though4 - even though the velvety flowers look lovely and the scent may seem delicious, the plant is *not* good enough to eat."?

"In the section about propagating from cuttings I changed 'stems' to 'sections of stems'. Is that correct?"

I don't think so - when I wrote 'stems' I meant stems with growing tips, so a branch-like thing rather than a slice of main stem.

How about "The plants can also be propagated by taking cuttings. In Autumn, cut non-flowering stems about 5-7cm (2-3in) long from the Heliotropes in your garden. Insert the stems into a plant pot filled with sandy soil and keep the pot indoors over winter in a sunny place, ensuring the compost stays moist."?

"I've changed 'many years' to 'since the 19th Century' to give it a bit more definition. As far as I've been able to find out it was introduced to gardens some time in the 18th."

Believe it or not, I did think about that sentence *very* carefully - now it has repetition of 19th Century in the paragraph. I see you mentioned art as well, though, which is interesting so instead we shall have:

"The plants have been known for many years, and even inspired artists, poets and poetry. Emily Dickinson almost certainly grew Heliotrope in her famous garden1 in the 19th Century, and a perfume created to evoke the flowers' fragrance persuaded Arthur Symons to write 'White Heliotrope' in 1896. In the 20th Century, Cicely Mary Barker included a Heliotrope Fairy in her 'Flower Fairies' series of paintings and poems."

and you can include a link to A3895455 on Fairy

"I'm not having any problems with the degree symbol in my browsers (Firefox and Opera), but your 36°F is showing up as just that, rather than the symbol, for me. Do we do that in entries? I'm very new to subbing, although not writing entries. Are we supposed to do that for every symbol?"

http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/brunel/GuideML-Characters This is what I use (although it is slightly out of date, as a dash - will do just fine in any browser rather than having to be converted to – all the time).

My Firefox is mostly behaving today, so I can see that you did indeed insert a degree symbol into the GuideML Editor rather than using the "named entity" ° Strange that you're not seeing the symbol when you Edit the Entry to add 36°F and Save it, though - did you see the code rather than the symbol when you first looked at my Entry before changing it, or was it OK then? Most odd...



"I didn't want to change your entry too much."

Thank you - I'm glad (from here, it felt as though you would rather have written this Entry from scratch yourself because you don't like my style at all but at least we can discuss it and come to agreement )

Okay, let's see...

"Why not? Isn't it better than telling them they can when they can't...?"
The entry can't say either way, because it doesn't know, but that's by the by. "Heliotropes are often to be found in garden centres" comes across as an odd way of saying 'you can buy them at garden centres'... but I can't pin down exactly why that is . It doesn't succinctly put across the idea of buying them, and 'often' muddies the waters.

Ah, I see what you mean about 'if you want them in your garden every summer'. That makes perfect sense.

Velvety flowers - nice touch. Too many instances of 'though' in close proximity, however, but that's easy to fix.

Stems - got it.

"The plants have been known for many years"
Firstly, the entry is about one species of plant so it should be singular, which would match the references in the first paragraph, but 'The plant has been known' sounds odd, which is why I changed it to 'The Garden Heliotrope'.

'Many years' is a phrase I've never been comfortable with because of its vagueness. It could mean 50, it could mean 150. In this instance it means around 250, which is getting into centuries rather than years. If you know how long something has been happening I reckon it's best to say so, or give as close of an approximation as you can.

I felt too that 'known' wasn't the correct word there. In the same way that, for instance, America or Australia was known by the people who lived there for centuries before us Europeans 'discovered' it (gosh, aren't we clever ), native Peruvians would probably have been familiar with the Heliotrope before it was found by European/American explorers, so it's been known for much longer than 'many years' - since long before it was cultivated in gardens by westerners. What would you say to:
"The Garden Heliotrope has been a popular plant with European and American gardeners since the late 1700s [or 18th Century if you prefer], and has inspired artists and poets. Emily Dickinson almost certainly grew Heliotrope in her famous garden1 in the 19th Century, and a perfume created to evoke the flowers' fragrance persuaded Arthur Symons to write 'White Heliotrope' in 1896. In the 20th Century, Cicely Mary Barker included a Heliotrope Fairy in her 'Flower Fairies' series of paintings and poems."

You don't need to say "poets *and poetry*" because it's a given that poetry is what poets create.

'Even' is a word that sometimes gets over-used. In this context its usage is to hint at something exceptional, like 'He can make toffee, coconut ice and peanut brittle, and he can even make lettered rock', but flowers aren't an unusual source of inspiration for poets and there wasn't a setup leading up to the "even..." part of the sentence, so it would be out of place there.

I did a little research this morning and a few sources (but let's not trust everything we read on teh interwbez) have said that Arthur Symons' poem was published in a collection called London Nights in 1895 so it could have been written earlier. Do you have a source that says when it was actually written?

Phew. I need and

You really do hate my style...



"You don't need to say "poets *and poetry*" because it's a given that poetry is what poets create."

I did need to!!! It inspired the *poet* Emily Dickinson, as she became linked with the plant because of her garden (*not* her poems), and it also inspired *poetry*, as Arthur Symons mentioned it in his poems. OK it might be a device, but I liked the phrase because it was a bit of style (alliteration) rather than being flat prose. You have a style too - you didn't *need* to say "as summer slips into autumn" in that other bit you rewrote, but you did...



I don't know how to proceed now - I hate the way I feel you've trampled over what I wrote like it was some kind of half-finished fleamarket rescue, not something that was accepted from Peer Review, but I'm also having some kind of nervous breakdown about it, so I shall have to step away from h2g2 for a bit...

I think that's something of an over-reaction, and I don't hate your style. What I'll do is send the entry back to the Eds as it came out of PR and with the suggestions you made in this conversation.

Sorry for a miserable sub experience...

Overreaction it may have been, but that didn't help me last night... I also have written plant entries in the past, and they are not up to the standard of yours, but they did go through Peer Review and were subbed (by Guide Editors). Cue existential crisis about the whole h2g2 system and my contribution to it...

After my brain cooled off, I planned to rewrite the problem paragraphs in my own words, incorporating changes based on your comments and mine, but it's gone now (in neither your form nor mine). Off your hands, anyway.

Sorry