Today, the National Trust in the UK administers hundreds of public gardens, while sixty-odd years ago there was only one, Hidcote Manor near the English village of Chipping Campden. In 1949 Hidcote attracted a mere 600 visitors and took all of £30 during its first public season. Nowadays, Hidcote is famous worldwide as a masterpiece of design and planting, attracting 150,000 visitors and raising nearly £1 million from entrance tickets annually. Hidcote Garden was the creation of an American in Britain, the shy Major Lawrence Johnston, who came to live on the site in 1907 with his widowed mother, Gertrude Winthrop. In some respects Winthrop feared her son's talents for expensive landscape gardening and never allowed him full access to the family's funds. Nonetheless, with her inspiration and guidance Johnston started his design in 1908 and brought it to a peak in the early 1930s when he was in his 60s. He may rightly be ranked at this time beside Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, creators of Sissinghurst, his garden's only surviving equal.

Graham Thomas was tasked with reviving Hidcote, and he had to manage without these crucial documents. Thomas knew that for the gardens to be a commercial success he needed to extend those areas that were of most interest to the general public, so he introduced new plants and a Mediterranean Bank where Johnston had had nothing of the sort, while retaining the existing superb structure of avenues and evergreen rooms. As a result, since 1949, the visiting public has innocently been admiring Thomas's flower plantings, not Johnston's own. When the important designer Russell Page had visited Hidcote in 1934 he had hailed the half-hardy plants in the summer house as one of the highlights. But Thomas later got rid of them and pulled the house down, fearing such relatively colourless exhibits would not capture the public's imagination.

Then, in 2002, Johnston's old diaries and notebooks resurfaced. The present head gardener had started to give lectures about Hidcote's lost early designs, during which he appealed for memories from his audience. A few months later, a woman approached him with a box of papers she had found in her attic. They were the missing records, including Johnston's original planting lists and detailed sketches. This discovery prompted a major reassessment of the garden's history. Curators could now distinguish between Johnston's original vision and the later modifications. A debate began on whether to restore parts of the garden to its 1930s heyday, a complex project that would involve removing some of Thomas's popular additions. The diaries also revealed Johnston's meticulous notes on plant sourcing from his expeditions to China and South Africa, highlighting his dedication and global influence. This find has allowed historians to fully appreciate the depth of Johnston's genius, which had been partially obscured for over half a century.

A  Planet Earth is today circled by scores of satellites, orbiting like tiny moons after being sent aloft by rockets to perform a variety of useful tasks. Their story began long ago but rocket technology has progressed considerably since the days when bamboo poles filled with gunpowder were first used in China as fireworks around 500 BC, and since the Sung dynasty when rockets were first used to repel invaders at the battle of Kaifeng (Kai-fung-fu) in AD 1232. In Asia in recent years there has been a dramatic growth in space activities both in the utilisation of space-based services and the production of satellites and launchers. This rapid expansion has led many analysts to predict that Asia will become an important provider of services in space.

B  Worldwide there have been dramatic developments in space technology, and these have been eagerly embraced by Asian nations, which have found them to be especially adaptable for their particular problems. Asia, and Southeast Asia in particular, experiences recurrent large-scale environmental problems including storms and flooding, forest fires, and crop failures. The space application that has attracted the most attention in this region, therefore, is remote sensing. Remote sensing satellites, equipped with instruments to take photographs of the ground using different wavelengths, provide essential information about natural ground cover and planted crops, and this information facilitates work in environmental management, disaster prevention, and sustainable planning.

C  Imaginative and innovative applications of satellites are constantly being explored, with potentially revolutionary effects. To take a specific example, small antennas no more than 40 cm across and 15 cm high are embedded in slabs of stone, which are themselves embedded in the earth. Every 15 seconds a global positioning system measures the distance between each antenna and a satellite. The data is transferred to one of 200 monitoring stations around the world and provide a constant flow of information invaluable for the prediction of earthquakes. Asian nations have also eagerly embraced satellite technology in the field of health and telemedicine: patients in remote rural communities can be diagnosed and carers can be advised on medical treatment. Such things as pictures of the patient, pulse rate, temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygen can be monitored and transmitted to doctors thousands of kilometres away for reliable diagnosis and advice. There have also been beneficial advances in distance education programs, and agricultural planning and production have improved.

D  Access to the benefits of satellites was not always as straightforward as it might seem today. For decades, Japan has been the dominant space power in Asia. To achieve its pre-eminence, however, Japan had to face serious time-consuming technological challenges and high risks through many trials. This experimentation was problematic at first because Japan based its satellite manufacturing on traditional and very expensive Western military technological practices.

E  In more recent times, fundamental changes in satellites have dramatically reduced costs. 'Small satellites' have given Asian countries a way to develop low-cost satellite technology and rapidly establish a space capability of their own. The new entrants in the industry are able to shorten the time for trials by as much as a decade or more. Small satellites, which have opened the space age to developing countries, are classified in three groups: nano satellites have a mass less than 10 kg, micro satellites range from 10 to 100 kg and mini satellites are between 100 and 500 kg. Such is the appeal of small satellites that low-cost launcher rockets are being developed exclusively for mini satellites. The saving is even greater for nano and micro satellites, which can be launched as secondary passengers, hitching a ride on large launchers with pay-load to spare. Small satellites allow individual countries to select more convenient orbits for their own particular purposes. A low polar orbit is good for mapping. As the earth rotates from west to east, the satellite orbits north and south allowing it repeatedly to photograph any chosen parts of the Earth's surface.

F  Space technology in Asia has been facilitated by the competitive commercial sector and its production of low-cost mini satellites. The globalisation of industrial and financial markets has improved avenues for transferring technological innovation, and the availability of ready-made commercial technology may well result in a highly competitive Asian satellite industry. The laws of physics are the same all over the world, and the principles of electronics and mechanics know no political or cultural boundaries. However, engineering practice and management practice are not so readily transferable but are influenced by education, culture and history. These practices have an effect on costs, lead times, product designs and, eventually, international sales. Nevertheless, it can be expected that the acquisition of technical expertise, combined with the world-renowned Japanese manufacturing and management techniques, will soon produce world-class satellites at reduced costs.