Duchess's garden of cannabis, cocaine and opium

[emad]

The Times
By Alan Hamilton


ALREADY famous for her ornamental plantings, superlative roses and spectacular spending, the Duchess of Northumberland has won permission to grow drugs in her garden at Alnwick Castle.

One of the most popular tourist attractions in the North East is set to become an even bigger magnet for curious visitors next spring when they will be able to admire — but not pick — specimens of cannabis, opium poppies, magic mushrooms, tobacco and the coca plant, the source of cocaine.

The Home Office has approved a licence for the Duchess and the trust which runs the 40 acres of gardens at the border castle, on the grounds that the plants will be exhibited strictly for educational purposes. They will take their place alongside 50 other dangerous plants in what will be Britain’s largest public poison garden.

Peter Wirtz, a Belgian responsible for designing Alnwick’s classical water cascade, has also created the Poison Garden.
More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1352124,00.html

"Exhibited strictly for educational purposes" - that's a good one, hope everyone remembers this line when the cops raid them at 6am to bust them for the odd plant.....

[da_chimperor]

1. Cool! I've got some friends who grow drugs but It sounds like she's a pro

I'm curious as to how she's going to get opium poppies to grow in england.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Hothouse

A lot of mansions have solaria attached.

For the uninitiated, a solarium is a wing of a house that's a greenhouse. Great for growing drugs year-round!

--bkl
Not that I'd know anything about that.

[emad]

3. Easy, round here everyone grows them. The only illegal thing

about them is attempting to slash the seed pods after flowering and harvesting the goo. But cultivation is permitted.

Last summer when temperatures hit 100C in London there was a spate of garden rustling and reports that "hippies" had harvested poppies in order to sell the opium on.

[clownskull]

4. 100C

Holy Geez, that's hot :P

[emad]

5. It was. So hot that rare Mexican cacti at Kew Gardens suddenly

sprouted these amazing flowers - something that only happens once every 80-90 years.

[Sideways]

9. 100C Would be @250 degreesF

Did you mean 100F? :silly:

[emad]

10. Yep! 100FFFFFF! sorry about the typo...

[da_chimperor]

6. Oh yeah . . . I didn't really think about a greenhouse

Heh, oops!

[BlueEyedSon]

7. Yeah and all those elderly folks died in Paris. Global warming?

[emad]

8. Duke & Duchess of Northumberland: UK's No1 freeloaders.

Duchess got £££££££££'s handout from the National Lottery for her vanity project garden, while the Duke got £22 million from the Lottery for his tawdry "Madonna of the Pinks":

generally discredited by every major international art expert as a poor imitation and not THE original masterpeice....

[Lisa]

11. Chelsea Physic Garden's grown marijuana for years ...

The former director told me that they sometimes found people scaling the fence hoping for a little sample!


http://www.chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/