A hanging basket is a suspended container used for growing decorative plants. Typically they are hung from buildings, where garden space is at a premium, and from street furniture for environmental enhancement. They may also be suspended from free standing frames sometimes called hanging basket trees. One type of hanging basket is the inverted planter where plants are grown in an upside down pot and are watered from the top.
Hanging baskets are normally made from wire with an impervious, usually plastic, lining to retain the contents. [1] They are filled with peat-free compost usually with a water-retaining gel and controlled release fertiliser granules. [2] Typically they are planted with bedding plants and may include geraniums, fuchsia, and trailing plants around the edges such as lobelia. [2] [3] [4]
Safety concerns have been raised over hanging baskets. In February 2004, Suffolk County Council ruled there was a risk that baskets, part of the annual summer floral displays in Bury St Edmunds, could fall from lampposts and injure the public, and checked that the posts were strong enough to support them. [5]
Because of hosepipe bans due to drought, local authorities in South East England reduced the number of hanging baskets in public displays in spring 2006. [6]
A pub is in several countries a drinking establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. The term first appeared in England in the late 17th century, to differentiate private houses from those open to the public as alehouses, taverns and inns. Today, there is no strict definition, but the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) states a pub has four characteristics:
A billboard is a large outdoor advertising structure, typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertisements to passing pedestrians and drivers. Typically brands use billboards to build their brands or to push for their new products.
Katrina Amy Alexandra Alexis Price is an English media personality, model, and author. She gained recognition in the late 1990s for her glamour modelling work, most notably on Page 3 of the tabloid newspaper The Sun, under the pseudonym Jordan.
Dame Patricia Hope Hewitt is a British government adviser and former politician, who was the Secretary of State for Health from 2005 to 2007. A member of the Labour Party, she had previously been the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry from 2001 to 2005.
Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of upmarket department stores in the United Kingdom that is operated by Selfridges Retail Limited. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1908. The historic Daniel Burnham-designed Selfridges flagship store at 400 Oxford Street in London opened on 15 March 1909 and is the second-largest shop in the UK. Other Selfridges stores opened in the Manchester area at the Trafford Centre (1998) and at Exchange Square (2002), and in Birmingham at the Bullring (2003).
Geraint Richard Davies is a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Swansea West from 2010 to 2024. He was elected as a member of the Labour and Co-operative Party, but was suspended from the party in 2023 and sat the remainder of his term as an independent.
John Timothy Grogan is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Selby between 1997 and 2010 and for Keighley between 2017 and 2019. He is currently chair of the Mongolian–British Chamber of Commerce (MBCC).
Dasani is a brand of bottled water created by the Coca-Cola Company, launched in 1999. It is one of many brands of Coca-Cola bottled water sold around the world. The product is filtered and bottled.
In the United Kingdom censorship has been applied to various forms of expression such as the media, cinema, entertainment venues, literature, theatre and criticism of the monarchy. While there is no general right to free speech in the UK, British citizens have a negative right to freedom of expression under the common law, and since 1998, freedom of expression is guaranteed according to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as applied in British law through the Human Rights Act.
Container gardening or pot gardening/farming is the practice of growing plants, including edible plants, exclusively in containers instead of planting them in the ground. A container in gardening is a small, enclosed and usually portable object used for displaying live flowers or plants. It may take the form of a pot, box, tub, basket, tin, barrel or hanging basket.
Joseph Anthony Barton is an English professional football manager and former player who played as a midfielder. Barton made 269 appearances in the Premier League, including 130 for Manchester City; he was most recently the manager of League One side Bristol Rovers.
Leon Pryce is a professional rugby League coach who most recently coached Workington Town in League 1 and an English former professional rugby league footballer who played as a stand-off, wing, centre and fullback in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
An outdoor water-use restriction is a ban or other lesser restrictions put into effect that restricts the outdoor use of water supplies. Often called a watering ban or hosepipe ban, it can affect:
The Thames Gateway Water Treatment Works or Beckton Desalination Plant is a desalination plant in Beckton, London, adjacent to Beckton Sewage Treatment Works. The plant takes brackish water from the River Thames and converts it into drinkable water through a reverse osmosis process. The first of its kind in the UK, it was built for Thames Water by a consortium of Interserve, Atkins Water and Acciona Agua. It was opened by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on 2 June 2010. It was planned to provide up to 150 million litres of drinking water each day – enough for 900,000 Londoners. – but by 2023 had only operated on three occasions, and at two-thirds of its planned capacity.
Droughts are a relatively common feature of the weather in the United Kingdom, with one around every 5–10 years on average. These droughts are usually during the summer, when a blocking high causes hot, dry weather for an extended period. However this means that droughts can vary in their characteristics. All types of drought cause issues across all sectors, with impacts extending to the ecosystem, agriculture and the economy of the whole country in severe cases of drought. The south east of the country usually suffers most, as it has the highest population and the lowest average precipitation per year, which is even lower in a drought. Even in these areas in severe droughts, the definition, impacts, effects and management are all minimal in comparison to drought prone areas such as Australia and parts of the United States. In recent years however, the summers of 2007, 2008, 2009, August 2010 and 2012 were wetter than normal, 2007 being wettest on record. Droughts have continued to occur in recent times, with spring 2011, July 2013, summer 2018, spring 2020, spring and summer 2022 and May and June 2023 all featuring excessively dry periods for part or all of the UK, and will likely become more severe due to climate change over the 21st century.
The Caleb Foundation, created in 1998, is a creationist pressure group in Northern Ireland. It also lobbies on a range of social policy issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage from an evangelical Protestant perspective, and has been particularly influential with Democratic Unionist Party ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive. The organisation has described its mission as "promoting the fundamentals of the historic evangelical Protestant faith".
During the summer of 2022, parts of Europe experienced drought conditions exacerbated by heat waves. This was preceded by a warm and dry spring. On 9 August, a senior European Commission researcher said that it seemed to be Europe's worst year in 500 years. A report from the Global Drought Observatory has confirmed this. The drought had serious consequences for hydropower generation and the cooling systems of nuclear power plants, as the drought reduced the amount of river water available for cooling. Agriculture in Europe was also negatively affected by the drought. Scientists found that while precipitation deficits primarily caused the lack of water in the soil, human-induced global warming contributed to over 30% of the drought intensity and its spatial extent via enhanced evaporation.
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