Church or TARDIS? it appeared too small to hold the congregation
In March 2012 Kalman and Maria were helping prepare the tropical glasshouse for complete re-planting. There was heavy digging to do while we mixed 4-5 tonnes of home produced compost for filling the glasshouse beds and some photography which involved lifting a camera. Kalman and Maria got deeply involved with the work, splitting it equitably; Maria doing the heavy digging and Kalman taking the photographs. Since then Kalman has completed his PhD and now works for the Royal Horticultural Society and Maria is in the final year of her PhD. The two of them have not restricted themselves to botany though, they have, today, been married. As far as I’m aware it’s our first Tropical Biodiversity related wedding.
Kalman and Maria set me the task of solving a riddle – what is at 51°26’12.1”N 0°56’34.5”W? I knew it was Reading but that was not enough, I had to work out exactly where the location was. After accessing Maria’s parents WiFi system I managed to convert the coordinates to decimal degrees and then plotted them on Google maps, the result was:
The Tropical Biodiversity Glasshouse at Reading. Kalman and Maria put a huge number of hours of work into making the glasshouse work. Since it was set up it has hosted numerous visits from schools, Brownies and Cub packs as well as a range of other visitors from Reading and around the world. It is a testament to the two of them that they found time to support a venture that has helped others develop an interest in the amazing world of botany as well as to put in the hard work needed for a PhD and found time to discover each other and organize a wedding that involved bringing together family and friends from Greece, Hungary and the UK; two alphabets and three languages in total harmony.
