She is very enthusiastic. I wasn't expecting that. So far it is a visual feast.

Visually very beautiful, with wonderful music I thought, and definitely providing new insight into what it means to be a rose. Marlorena, can you pinpoint Carol Klein's accent, which is certainly not "country", but the occasional word comes through that is reminiscent of a certain locality.

..I'm glad you both liked it.... I did more than I thought I would..

Ingrid, when Carol speaks I hear something of a northern - Lancashire - accent but I think she's toned it down somewhat since she lived in London and now in the West Country in Devon, but I do not detect any Devon or London accent..... she's from the Manchester area originally of Lancashire and there's still something of that going on.... but otherwise I think it's rather mixed...

.... but if you've heard of another English presenter called Christine Walkden, - her 'Glorious Gardens from Above' is on You Tube, - she is also from Lancashire but speaks with a much broader accent than Carol does...

...conversely, I always had trouble with the 'New Yawk' accent, often wondering just where it came from until I found out, quite recently.... I don't think it's so common these days... Judge Judy, which I'm almost embarrassed to say I watch occasionally, sounds as though she has a little of that I think...

There's actually more than one New York City accent. I can hear the difference but I can't tell you which one is which.

Carol Klein's accent reminded me of the accent of one of the characters on "Downtown Abbey". Not sure which one. Is it Daisy?

Some regional American accents can be traced back to the accents then current in the parts of England where the original settlers came. And we in American use words that have long since been dropped from British English, such as "gotten" and "forgotten". I have been told that you folks would say simply "got" and "forgot" for the past participle. Is this correct?

Rosefolly, who loves words.

...the only New York accents I hear would be in films or on t.v. and I always associate Al Pacino with it... maybe it's Bronx...

...gotten is not a term I use or hear, but forgotten is alright, that's fairly common... as is got and forgot... we use all those...

..I must be one of the few people that's never watched Downton Abbey so I wouldn't know who Daisy is, but I think I know what you mean in any case Rosefolly....

..as you love words, and I also love languages and accents... let me give you a word for today that I use a lot, but which is unheard of in most of the country here as it's localised to where I was brought up... 'smeech'.... to me this means the smoke you get in a kitchen when you've been frying with too much heat and the fat starts to burn, and you have to use the extractor fan or open windows to let the smeech out...

..I doubt Carol would have heard of that one either, yet she now lives in the next County to where I was born..

I love that car btw. Her accent sounds to me like a vague northern accent consciously tamed towards a common form of Queen's Engish (what the English term 'Received Pronounciation').

Well I am a northerner (just north of Manchester) and whatever CK's accent is, it is certainly nothing familiar to me (although all I hear is TV presenter hyperspeech, mixed in with her previous profession of primary teacher)...and hey, another non-watcher of gowns and bonnets Downton - not least because this complete prole simply could not watch parodies of our 'ruling classes' without insane teeth grinding (and the non-ownership of a TV).

Regarding dialect and accents, my offspring (and horribly of late, myself) have all stopped using the phrase 'going to' in favour of 'gunnoo'. What are we coming to? I despair.

Mind you, Marlorena, there is a sort of exaggerated professional northerner speak (and I am afraid Christine Walkden and that nitwit Guy Martin are promoters of this) which is simply unrecognisable in the real world - we have actually stopped saying stuff like 'ee by goom', 'ey up lad' and 'down t'mill ...unless you are 80 years old and have never left Huddersfield or Salford in one's entire life...or are a TV or radio presenter wishing to appear 'quirky'.

I like 'smeech' and counter with 'gak'...although Cornwall has always had something odd and foreign - 'another country' indeed.

Coronation Street has a lot to answer for, Campanula... although I would imagine there are still pockets where these terms continue to be used...

..of course these days, it can be surprising - almost a shock - to hear English being spoken of any sort, at least around where I am.... although for the most part, I don't find this too great an issue... I now have several words of Polish at my disposal...

..maybe I just squeak 'gak' at anyone I don't understand... sounds good to me....

I am so fascinated by the way Carol Klein pronounces words like country and culture that I miss what she's actually saying. I try to imitate her but I can't. I am not musical and don't have a good ear for dialects. Not like my grandson who came back from London and made perfect imitations of West Indian English he'd heard on Electric Avenue in Brixton. His adopted English is Michigan American, picked up from his admired basket coach, an ex-pro from Lansing. Swedish schools teach RP but most children try to talk with an American accent.

Mariannese, the absence of the so called 'foot-strut split' is one of the main phonological characteristics of Northern English accents. Similarly with the pronounciation of the (dia)phoneme /aʊ/ so it seems strange to me why English native speakers here do not discern obvious northern accent characteristics in her accent. It might be because her accent is not consistently northern.

..I hear her northern accent, no doubt about it, I wouldn't have said she was likely to be originally from anywhere else, but what I don't get is any hint of received pronunciation.... what I would call 'well spoken'...

..well, maybe just a little...

...what I don't like so much these days is the dumbing down that producers of t.v. programmes appear to insist upon...

Ah yes, exactly Marlorena - I have watched CK morph from an enthusiastic speaker (with only faint northern intonations, leavened with the merest west country notes, although we do a bit of rolling our r's in Lancashire also) into this insanely over the top breathless presenter mode which makes my teeth itch. I had to rid myself of TV some years ago as I felt as though my blood pressure was going through the roof (Tories, Nick Clegg, absolute rubbish such as so-called reality drivel - you know the stuff) and my friends and family honestly feared for my sanity - this rabid mouth-foaming woman raving on a sofa - not a pleasant sight for anyone and I was truly sick of the sound of my own (shouty, sweary) voice.

Younger women (mainly) across the US have adopted a nasal, staccato version of the Valley Girl accent with pseudo-RP vowels. You can hardly find a TV weather-woman who doesn't say "sneow." So. Marianne, maybe the Swedish kids should heed their English teachers and not imitate US movie actors, who speak passé dialects like the aforementioned Bronx, Michigan, etc. and the previous Standard American. I listen to NPR a lot, and it seems like 90% of the educated women being interviewed are VG-speakers.

..I must say, I've not heard of such a thing as a Valley Girl accent nor indeed a Michigan specific dialect.... I used to think that Americans had just 2 accents, standard American and Southern, which I thought I could detect... then I discovered the New York accent mentioned above.... but as far as I could tell that was it.... is there such a thing as a Californian or Texas accent/dialect? can you tell which State a person is from by listening to their accents? I didn't think you could...

Well, as a teen growing up in San Fernando Valley in Southern California, I didn't think I had a valley girl accent. Then I went to the UC San Diego, a California university just a few hours away and people instantly recognized where I was from. They completely ignored my science question and laughed, because I sounded just like "that song"! This is the song they were referring to: Frank Zappa Valley Girl

I hope my accent is less now, but I know it's still there somewhere...Like for sure, there is no snow-oh in the valley!

The Texas accent is nasal, produced high the mouth and with slack lips. The California accent features a harder R than found in other American dialects (ferr shurr, wish they all could be California girrls). Corners of the mouth are tensed to produce the Californian "dyude" and "sneow," Coastal Southerners may say those words with similar phonetics, but drawled with relaxed lips. Americans can also recognize distinctive accents of the upper Midwest (WI, MN, ND), New England, NYC/ NJ, Appalachia, and the lower South.

The Valley Girl accent is Californian with a massive vowel shift, which may have begun when some high school fashion leader came back from a visit to the UK with a mild case of Received Pronunciation (inaccurately called BBC accent). VG is also characterized by "uptalk," energetic lip action, and a change in rhythm that reduces the contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables. It may be the Standard American of the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTQz7Mbp0oY

Being from southern California and not a Valley Girl I have the impression that I have no accent, sounding like news announcers across the country who have had their local accents trained out of them, but that could be my perception. It really takes other people to tell you whether you have one or not. My pet peeve is the degradation of language i.e. "Myself and Bob went to the store" instead of "Bob and I went to the store" of "this impacts" instead of "this affects" or "this is very concerning" instead of "this raises great concern". I could go on and on, probably because, having studied literature, these things grate on my ear much more.

Oh, thanks for the information about the gardening show. I've watched almost every British gardening show on youtube. It's just so comforting even if I know I'll never be able to grow all the plants.

Speaking of accents it's interesting how the regional accents change over the years. I've noticed the Canadian accents I hear (British Columbia) sound more "American" than they did in the past. Of course, I can't hear if my own accent has changed LOL!

...thanks for those links, now I know what Valley Girl is all about... I can't say I'd heard of that term before.... but listening to the link put up by Jasminerose, it's something I feel I hear quite a bit on t.v. in American shows.... that was quite funny actually...

..'ferr shurr' rings many bells with me too, michaelg.... I'm so glad you highlighted that as I had not realised this was typically Californian - this makes sense to me...

...Barbara, I'm delighted you enjoy the gardening shows... I find I catch up with them sometimes months later,... I don't always watch at the time they are shown here...

..Ingrid, what concerns me from over here, is the British use of some American terms like 'gonna' and 'wanna'.... it's been going on for years but I've never quite got used to it...

...well, I'm gonna go have a cuppa tea... now there's a strange hybrid....

To continue off topic: are regional dialects accepted or looked down on? I first studied Swedish at university in 1967 when most of the students had to get rid of their local dialects. It was understood that we would all become teachers and should set an example of correct standard speech. I say most because some dialects were more acceptable than others, for no logical reason. For instance, Swedish speakers in general find the southernmost dialects difficult to understand. The southern provinces were once part of Denmark and as language is conservative sounds (diphtongs, triphtongs and rolling r's) and vocabulary still taste of Danish. But this dialect was one our teachers really loved. One professor hated her native dialect and some of the dialects in the capital. My northern r's were too blurred so I had to sit in a corner and train them away.

I returned to university in 1976 to study Nordic languages and English. Attitudes had changed completely. Now we should cherish our venerable and ancient dialects. And some are so old that a 10th century Viking would have little trouble understanding a contemporary speaker. But it was too late for me to go back to the language of my childhood. I can understand but not speak it. Now you can hear every dialect spoken by presenters on Swedish television, quite unthinkable 30 years ago. Listeners complain and ask for subtitles.

Professional linguists may be tolerant but I suspect that the general public is not so tolerant and I know there are prejudices against some dialects. What is the attitude in English speaking countries?

..anything goes over here Marianne... well, anything except the one that I actually care for, and that's the accent of someone who has been privately educated at an expensive fee paying Public school... they sound posh.... and this apparently is too much for many people... which is a shame I think... it seems to be frowned upon these days, a form of prejudice if you ask me, but I rather like it... it sounds as it is.... like the person has had at least a half decent education... but people associate it with privilege, and resent it...

...the thing is, I'm half deaf, and some of the coarser accents just pass me by.....I nod as if I've understood, but I haven't...

...I'm not clear as to which dialect you are referring to, that you understand but no longer speak... the one from childhood.... is that northern Swedish? what would that be called...?

Oh yes, there are still many prejudices against regional dialects and accents but, as ever, politics and culture are always intermingled and generally those urban/industrial city accents such as midlands, the north-east, Liverpool and Mancunian tend to be devalued while rural accents are also subject to the obscure but nonetheless fully implemented class biases which dictate that a soft Devonshire or Bristolian or Cotswold accent carries more cachet than rural Norfolk or Northumbrian speech...while urban youth appear to adopt a kind of fake West Indies/Jamaican accent or a kind of bastardised cockney/mockney/estuary drawl which is enthusiastically adopted (at least temporarily) by all classes. In truth, as always, language and diction is always in flux...which I like. My own accent, has often been a hindrance, coming across as northern simpleton (those long 'O's and absolutely phonetic 'U's) while I was slightly horrified to hear my grand-daughter requesting to put on some 'moosic', east anglian stylee (recognise it, Marlorena?)

And what's with that posh way of saying 'yes' - 'ears'...or 'yaah' (baffled!)

Yep (ha), I have confessed to saying 'gonna'...or rather 'gunnoo'.

...around these parts, for 'thank you'... they say ''thank yer''.... which I find most odd... and simply cannot replicate...

..I blame pop music for all the gonna's and wanna's... and in some respects I've gone along with it... I remember The Beatles only too well... bought all their records... one of which was ''I Want To Hold Your Hand''.. now this is from 1964... but of course they never sang ''I Want To...'' it was ''I Wanna Hold Your Hand''... and to be fair, it wouldn't sound right any other way...

Aw, I noticed the link to Carol Klein's Plant Odysseys isn't working anymore. I'm glad I had the chance to see it when I did. Thank you, Marlorena.

..thanks for alerting me, yes I see that it's gone jasminerose... I'm not surprised as it was probably illegal to put it on You Tube as the programme was only shown on t.v. 27th July just gone, and would still be copyrighted I imagine... I expect whoever put it up had their account closed...

..I can watch it on BBC iPlayer as it's still available for another couple of weeks.. but I don't think this can be accessed internationally.... at least, not by law abiding citizens...

Regional accents may sound irritating to people from another region. Nobody with a coastal southern, Appalachian or Okie-Arkie dialect reads the news or serves as host on American radio or TV. You hear Standard American, Valley Girl, and New York voices, also Black and Latino if not too heavily accented. Last winter, National Public Radio had a woman from Minnesota or thereabouts reading the "support comes from" bits, and I confess being annoyed by her voice. There may have been complaints, because she went away after a few months.

"Thank you" in Valley Girl is something like "thenk yiaw."

Marlorena, I grew up on the 64th parallel not far from the Baltic. We called our dialect "bondska" which means something like peasant speech but we didn't use the term in a pejorative sense, only to distinguish it from standard Swedish. Several nationally famous writers have come from there, perhaps because of a strong oral tradition. Sara Lidman, Per Olof Enquist and Torgny Lindgren have all have some works translated into English. This part of Sweden used to be isolated so dialects were preserved longer than in many other parts of the country. They are fast disappearing now.

...mariannese, the only Swedish people I've heard of really, would be Abba, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo... and some tennis players like Bjorn Borg...Stefan Edberg... I honestly cannot think of any others right now... not that this means anything other than my own ignorance... but I learn every day, and today it's 'bondska'... it must have been very cold up near the Baltic....

michaelg... I hear this ''thenk yiew'' a lot on t.v. maybe young film stars?..

American ladies I always liked to hear were the late Lauren Bacall... Laura Bush, and I don't mind listening to Hilary Clinton.... Megyn Kelly on Fox News is another... and one of my favourite newscasters was Judy Woodruff formerly of CNN... no idea where she is now... but she was quite brilliant during the Gulf War I thought...

..oh, you mean Euclid 'Sackthelotofus'....

..Nik, I love the way he talks.... just the accent I like... I would barely know he wasn't British, could be a leftover from Blair's Labour Party for all I'd know... and Euclid...what a lovely name too..

...I'm delighted to hear you were both in London all those years ago, and having a great time... if it was circa 1980, well I was there too, - also having a great time - but rest assured... I don't recall meeting any Greeks... but as you both speak such beautiful English, I probably wouldn't have known.... nor cared....

...things change..we move on...

..best wishes....

p..s obviously I have become mathematically challenged... 1980 is 35 years ago... way before your time...

Marlorena, I was in London from about '84 to '86, then in Cambridge, then back in London till the end of the 80s. Euclid, however much he has bittered many of us, is a nice chap. He loves his port and his cricket. When I met him, all those years ago, he could barely speak any Greek. Which hasn't improved that much since then.. It's fun when you listen to him conversing with Heather, his Edinburghian wife. She has such a lovely accent. A bit of a contrast, I should say.

aah..ok... I was working in London then, like you until early 90's.... had a great time, worked for an American company... so generous too, we got paid an extra month each year as a bonus... I worked just off Piccadilly.. and met my husband circa 1981... but we all like to move away for the country life.... sometimes I think, if we had stayed, our apartment there would be worth... half a million now I should think...

.....Euclid seems like a pleasant enough gentleman, regardless of his politics...

...Carol Klein should have visited my area for her roses, as literally just around the corner from where I live, are David Austin rose fields,... several in fact, they seem to change the fields from one year to another...often transferring to a field just across the road... when the bare root season is finished and they have to replant...

...I presume they're satellite Austin fields, perhaps servicing the East of England? but they could be privately owned, I'm not sure... but all the roses are those they stock....

... I meant to take some photos earlier this summer but didn't get around to it, so some are bit bedraggled...

..if you're Austin sensitive, look away now....

....more follows....

..most of the labels had either vanished, disintegrated or unreadable...

'Ballerina'...

..no i.d...

..no i.d.

^'Queen of Sweden'.... this rose was amongst the best of the lot...

'Queen of Sweden' rows...

...masses of others..but I didn't bother to take photos of those I already grow, like Royal Jubilee, Kew Gardens etc.... but Queen of Sweden I think is a must have for me next year...

..just one last rose and one of my favourites that I saw... it might be 'Falstaff' but I'm not sure... it's obviously repeat flowering and had a fine old rose scent.... I'd really like this one too... but no label....

..if anyone knows, please tell....

Is the red one 'Rose de Rescht'?

It surely looks like it Michael. It is certainly a Portland like rose. Btw, RdR is too well repeating not to have some oriental blood in it, in my view.

..thank you so much, both.... when I first saw it, I thought it was an old variety, but then wondered if it might be one of his own.... I looked on Austin's site but didn't match this one up... I'm so pleased...

Are you near Wisbech, Marlorena? I know Cottage Memories have rose fields there (ever ordered from them, they supply Henry Cecil, the racehorse breeder)...and also grow a lot of Austins.

Funnily enough, I was in London in the 70s (worked at Institute for Directors (unbelievably) on their magazine, typesetting and proof-reading...long before Macs.

Moved to Cambridge in mid 70s()where were you Nik? Doing what? Did you like it?)

QoS is a fine rose although too upright for my taste. It should be good for group plantings. I have 2 planted close together I wish I had planted 3 or 4.

I was in the University, Camps.

Campanula.. thanks for that information... I know Cottage Memories but they are located about 2 to 3 miles away from where this field is... maybe it's one of theirs but I've checked their rose catalogue and they don't list a number of those I saw today... so I'm not sure... if I see any workers [they're mostly East European I think] I shall see if I can find out.... there is another very large rose field about half to 1 mile from this one, that is closer to CM.... I'm curious to find out...

...I didn't know they supplied the late Sir Henry Cecil.... I always thought he got his from Beales.... I met him a couple of times actually, he was always such fun... I had a tour of his rose gardens at Warren Place, and I have a photo he kindly consented to allow me to take, of himself with my husband... he told me his favourite rose was 'Reine des Violettes'... so I planted one in his memory....

...looks like we were all in London 70's/80's time.... what fun...

Nik... yes it does look a bit upright, that rose, but it's free flowering nature, especially in August, is what swings it for me...

Oh well, town and gown being a million miles apart, it is unlikely we would have met. Truly though, in 35 years of living here, i know a scant handful uni types (but only because they stayed on in Cambridge) and only 2 actual students. Two completely different worlds, only colliding in the event of gate-crashing a May ball or (in my case) making use of the bathrooms and laundry facilities during my Cambridge squatting days. I did, however, run a little side business for a few years with a photographer friend of mine - we used to photograph all the rowing events from the riverside at Fen Ditton - I had a colour key and a cheap dictaphone to record each crew as they whizzed past. We would rush home, stay up all night to develop the film and get the proofs out then I would mount a print onto some card and using my very best calligraphy, would fill in the title, crew name, bow, stroke, cox etc. Despite every race/boat/event looking absolutely identical, most of the rowers ordered a few copies of every single race across the whole season (we did Henley and Tideway Head as well). It was an easy and lucrative money-spinner for me, enabling me to go globetrotting for months on end (which is how I got to Greece for a summer).

..I'm phoning Cottage Memories this week to see if that's their field or not... as the crimson rose in the photo, thought to be 'Rose de Rescht' is not listed on their site, but 'Othello' is, and I wonder now if it might be that one...

...it's funny but I've never called on them before, as they're not open to the public, and yet they're only a few miles from me... often drive past.... they certainly have a good selection of roses...

Marlorena, how large are the blooms on this plant? RdR's blooms are smallish with very short necks. They are kind of bulbous not cupped as Othello's pics show (I don't grow that one). The colour is a deep pink - fuchsia purple not really red (sorry I'm not very good with describing colours in English). Leaves are characteristically damask like.

..oh right, from your description it sounds like RdR.. doesn't it? I've only got the photos above, and the bloom is likely 3 inches across I should think. The foliage and form of the bush made me think it was an OGR rather than an Austin.... I'll try find out this week.... thanks for your help though....

That's not 'Othello'. It's a Portland.