Would be best to read the whole thing for yourself. That’s probably the only way it would make real sense. Or start to make sense, at least.

But for a quick overview, here goes…

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It’s 1887, around Easter-time.

French guy comes over to the East Coast to talk about farming-practices with some guy called the Earl of Leicester, up in north Norfolk. (The name and age and profession he gives for the Earl all match up with our timeline, by the way: interesting…)

He’s heard about these weird plant-things over in England, but he doesn’t believe any of it. He’s in for a shock.

He’s heard about the weird politics in the country – kind of egalitarian, from the diary, but also from Uncle George’s thing about “where then was the gentleman?” and so on. But he doesn’t believe that either, not least because the Earl is obviously an important man with a title and all that. He’s in for a shock there too.

When he does get what’s going on with the plant-things and the politics, he goes absolutely crazy about it: he wants to do all his own plant-things back home in France. He’s warned that it won’t work over there, in part because there’s no infrastructure to support it, and also because the politics and more are all part-and-parcel of it and it won’t work without them.

He doesn’t listen. He goes ahead anyway.

It does not end well…

Kind of a cautionary tale, I guess. But painfully real. Oh well.