The Gardeners' World Blog

I get a lot of stuff in my inbox pointing me at things around the web. The worst ones are badly-conceived sales pitches, which usually contain words such as “compelling” and “addictive” when the product is anything but...

The best are when you get an example of something you’ve thought of yourself and never done because you (or your colleagues) have neither the time, energy or skills.

From a work perspective, the best example is Virtual Replay. In 2001 I was in Munich watching England win 5-1 and some guys in a van try to recreate the goals in 3D - and would you believe beforehand we wondered whether we’d have enough interesting incidents to try it out? It was nearly three years later when technology caught up and a different method proved successful.

I don't know whether Google Earth took that long to develop (I doubt it). But almost inevitably it is responsible for now making another dream a reality - near-3D modelling of the entire Tour de France route.