I seem to have killed off the section on my home page entitled ‘blogs I like’, which is what happens when you start fiddling around without knowing what you’re doing.
I wanted to remove a link from the list, having received an email yesterday saying the blog in question had been taken down. I’m not even certain what it was called now; I think it was ‘The no dig gardener’, it was something like that. I’d stumbled across it years ago while looking for the National Collection holder of Dicentra, who turned out to be a man called Roger Brook, who by coincidence had been a lecturer of mine way way back when I was at college in York.
I am a no-dig gardener too but my take on it was rather different from his. He was maintaining a couple of cemeteries around local churches, a massive undertaking for one elderly man, and was able to do it with the judicious use of glyphosate weedkiller plus the expertise that comes with being a lecturer at a horticultural college for many years.
His blog fell silent in the early days of the covid epidemic but remained online, albeit with no new additions. It comprised an extensive body of articles covering a wide range of mainly garden related topics and I referred to it from time to time.
And now it’s gone. Perhaps there is an archived version of it somewhere. I don’t know what happened to its author, perhaps he was a casualty of covid in which case I hope he was laid to rest in one of his beautiful graveyards and that someone else took up the maintenance of it.
The same fate awaits this blog and when it does almost none of the people who follow it will know what became of me or be able to find out. Did I get dementia or did my computer die and I chose or was unable to repair/replace it?
Am I still alive or are my useful elements being taken up by the weeds in some corner of an unconsecrated memorial ground?
Thank you Roger Brook, for the contribution you made to the knowledge I accumulated in my life. Some of has been indispensable; I have passed some of it on and kept some for myself.
garden ruminations 
Ben here, Roger’s son. Roger fell out of love with gardening after the flood (the National Dicentra Collection also a casualty), and never got the bug again. He died peacefully at home at the weekend, I am sorry to report.
I will do what I can to resurrect the blog, I have access to the laptop and email and hopefully something can be done. As someone above mentioned, the wayback machine is also an alternative.
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Sorry to hear about Roger’s passing. I can sympathise with his falling out of love with gardening, it is a two steps forward, one step back business at the best of times and it must have been truly heart breaking to have been flooded so badly. I barely knew him personally, he was a lecturer when I was at college many many years ago, but he left me and the world at large better informed, which is a fine legacy in my book.
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A very thought-provoking post; I’ve often thought about what will happen with my various blogs when I can no longer maintain them.
People may not be aware of the “Wayback Machine” which is a vast archive of the internet. Roger’s blog posts are available there, although not in a particularly user-friendly format!
1. Go to web.archive.org and type nodiggardener.co.uk into the search bar.
2. Click on “URLs” from the menu which appears across the top of the screen.
3. That brings back a (very) long URL list of posts and comments from the blog.
4. Click on one of those and a calendar appears, with various dates highlighted.
5. If you click on the earliest of those, then click on the time popup, it brings up a copy of the original blog.
I’m sure the Wayback Machine wasn’t as tortuous when I’ve used it in the past, so maybe I’ve not got something quite right. But other ways of trying to get to the archived blog pages resulted in an error, this was the only way I could get it to work. I think you’d have to REALLY need something to use it much!
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Thank you for your thoughtful piece Jim. As you know Roger and I corresponded through our respective blogs for quite a few years and I even visited his garden. Along with the cemeteries he took over the Cemetery Garden at Bolton Percy which was featured on Gardener’s World. Perhaps, because of my principally agricultural background I was more than sympathetic when it came to his use of glyphosate, although not everyone agreed. He once told me that he was approached by a magazine, whose name escapes me, to do an article about the Cemetery Garden. They were very keen until the word glyphosate came into the conversation! I never did find out if anything was published. Roger was a great loss to the horticultural world, and a man who wasn’t afraid to stand by his principles because he had the knowledge to do so. He also gave me hours of entertainment and instruction over a far too brief a period.
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A good post, and well thought-out. It is sad when favorite bloggers are done, but I feel blessed to have followed them while they were active.
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Delightful! “Some of (Brook’s knowledge) has been indispensable; I have passed some of it on and kept some for myself.”
I laughed, wondering what you didn’t share.
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Very nice
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I too followed his blog Jim, and I am sorry to hear that Roger Brook’s posts are no longer available. He was such a gentleman and it was through Dicenteras that I came across his blog. He was generous with his knowledge. I think he had a big blow when his own garden and maybe even perhaps the cemetery was damaged by extensive flooding during that very wet winter only two or three years ago. Did you read what was perhaps his last post mentioning this?
I write my blog, just from the sheer enjoyment of collecting my thoughts and it acts as a repository for some of my pictures and stories for myself to search and look back on. If anyone is inspired or benefits from it so much the better.
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