The preamble for this puzzle was fairly short, comprising only two sentences.

We were told that eight unclued entries were all instances of the second half of 45 across. One of the instances was to be formed from two of the unclued entries (1 down + 38 across).  One of the instances of the second half of 45 across was the whole of 45 across.  This got me thinking about areas of botany or biology where plants, birds or creatures are given latin names which can be constructed of two identical words - e.g. cygnus cygnus (whooper swan).  It turned out that I was thinking vaguely along the right lines, but the reality was a bit simpler once the second half of 45 across was deduced as PLANTS.

Secondly we were told that the completed grid would hold nine examples of what could be found in a rockery. These nine examples had to be highlighted before submission, so Hihoba’s comment on the Inquisitor of last week, that you don’t always have to solve the final step win the prize, doesn’t apply in this case. However, given my problems with this last bit, perhaps it would have been better for me if we didn’t have to highlight anything.

The clues were not difficult to solve. Indeed, I found this one of the easiest grids to fill for some time and completed the grid in under two hours.  That’s fast for me.  Many of the clues wouldn’t have been out of place in a daily cryptic of the kind blogged elsewhere on Fifteensquared.

The eight unclued plants were deduced as follows:
18 across: PERIWINKLE
23 across: PETUNIA
31 across: CRAB
39 across: ANEMONE
45 across SHRIMP PLANTS
1 down, 38 across: BLADDER NUT
28 down: LETTUCE

With the grid completed, it was now the time to seek the nine rockery examples of lengths 4, 4, 6, 6, 6, 7, 10, 10 and 12.  This was the most challenging part of the puzzle for me and I am not sure that I have got the right nine examples.  Initially, I went looking for species of alpine plants or heathers that might be found in a garden rockery but the appearance of MUSSEL (edible shellfish) in row 2 and LIMPET (mollusc that clings to rocks) in row 6 soon convinced me that we were being asked to look for examples of creatures or other living organisms that can be found in rock pools.

I felt that these would be located left to right across or vertically down, but I also had a good look at right to left, and up, as well as studying all sorts of diagonals in both directions.

It became apparent that some of the unclued entries would have to double duty as plants and creatures or seaweed in the rockery as the only way of getting 10 and 12 letter examples seemed to involve PERIWINKLE (as an edible gastropod with a shell), SEA-LETTUCE (seaweed) , and BLADDERWRACKS (more seaweed).

The only relevant seven letter word that I could find was ANEMONE (in its meaning as sea-anemone or soft-bodied polyp).

This left a six letter word and two four letter words for the rockery.

On the grounds that WINKLE was part of  PERIWINKLE, I plumped for SHRIMP (shellfish) as the remaining six letter word.

There is another six letter possibility in RED-EYE which is a rudd or roach. I think though that a roach is a freshwater fish and therefore unlikely to be found in rock-pools.

One four letter word, again doing double duty as a plant and a rock pool inhabitant, was CRAB (shellfish)

For the final four letter word, from the vaguely relevant words available, I had a choice of FISH (row 2) and LANT (row 13).  I decided that FISH was too generic, so I plumped for LANT which is another word for LAUNCE (an eel-like fish that buries itself in the sand at ebb-tide).  I am a bit unsure though whether the LANT ventures into rocks or just lives in open sand.

If you dig a bit further, and look at back-words and up-words as well, you can see KEEL (row 11), CERO (column 2), TIDE (column 9 up). and SEAL (column 13)   I couldn’t find anything relevant on any diagonal.  I am sure there are many rusted and broken KEELs lying abandoned on rocks all over the world.  A CERO is a large tropical West Atlantic fish, so probably not a frequent inhabitant of rock pools.  The TIDE comes in and out every day, creating rock pools along the way.  On holiday this year I saw many SEALs basking on rocks just by the shoreline as the sea crashed around them.  SEAL however is already part of SEA-LETTUCE.  

I have submitted my nine rockery inhabitants as BLADDERWRACK, SEA-LETTUCE, PERIWINKLE, ANEMONE, MUSSEL, LIMPET, SHRIMP, CRAB and LANT but I don’t feel confident.

When this blog goes live, I shall be camped on a farm in Cropredy, along with 20,000 others attending this year’s Fairport Convention annual festival, and won’t have access to a computer until Sunday.    I hope the weather holds out for the end of the week, but it’s not looking hopeful.

 Loved this puzzle! Great stuff from Lato.

I (HI) can’t take much credit for solving it though. A weekend’s windsurfing left me exhausted physically and in no state mentally to tackle some very tricky clues. Fortunately HO and BA were on form and solved the clues. After a bit of collaboration we sorted out the “Thematic” words. The final strokes of genius came from a friend who said “it can’t be as simple as ‘Chas and Dave’ can it?” and I spotted that CHAD and SAVE could be converted into the aforementioned singers by a simple letter transposition - hence the title GIVE and TAKE. My wife armed with this information looked at the list of thematic words and said “POSH and BECKS” and proceded to solve the pairs!

So how did it work? The Thematic words were:

Pairing them after shifting a letter from one to the other we get:

Solving time : Can’t really estimate it - see above!

The “normal” clues have the extra words indicated in bold.

A fairly light puzzle from Quixote this week, though I don’t mean that in a bad way. I worked through the puzzle very quickly, for me, getting stuck on just one of the cryptic clues. This in turn meant not being able to fully resolve two of the unclued rows.

The across clues were all definition and letter mixtures, DLMs. These are not cryptic clues but, like Printer’s Devilry, make reasonably regular appearances in thematic puzzles. The extra twist here was that the letter mixture contained an extra letter, this made things a little harder. Luckily the standard constraint of the mixture starting at the start or ending at the end of a word helped. A DLM clue can have several superfluous words that lend to the surface but can create ambiguities giving more than one potential mixture. Often it isn’t worth looking at a DLM clue until you have a checking letter (20ac may have been an exception for some). One letter isn’t usually enough to pin down the exact letter mixture but the more checking letters the more you can zero in on the answer.

So, my strategy here was to first cold solve as many down answers as possible. Then, using the checking letters, identify as many letter mixtures as possible. Solve a few of these and then iterate. All the time keeping an eye on the extra letters and what they might spell. I ignored the unclued rows until I haad the theme.

The extra letters spelled out HOW MANY BOB DYLAN the response to this is, of course, that the answer is blowing in the wind. The unclued across rows were thus resolved as anagrams of synonyms of ANSWER inside names of WINDS.

In the analysis below I have not examined the DLM clues, there is no point, but simply stated the answers and extra letters. It would be interesting to know from the setter how much superfluous material can be added? Is it just to create a good surface or to deliberately create ambiguities.

Anyone for tennis?  This puzzle was published on Ladies Finals Day at Wimbledon.

We were told that 14 of the 44 clues contained a misprint with the correct letters spelling out the topical request of the title.  We were also told that six thematic clues (unaffected by misprints) had to be ’smashed’ - a good tennis term - before entry.  These smashed entries were all to be real words.  That information helped me.  Further, another thematic phrase (9,9) would be found hidden symmetrically in the grid - except for one letter in each word.  Finally we had to locate the eight letters of each word and draw a line in the shape of each missing letter, to connect each set (tennis again).

There was a lot to take in and I didn’t get the tennis link for a while.  I got it from the misprinted letters which I realised about half way through were going to spell out>

NEW BALLS PLEASE?

The six words that were smashed, all had meanings which could be interpreted as ball, so we were smashing balls.

The six words before smashing were:

GLOBE - ball

GRUB - a ball that travels along the ground, e.g. a grub kick in rugby

LEATHER - the ball in certain games, e.g. cricket

CALTROP - an iron ball with four spikes

PROM - a school or college dance, or ball.  Chambers says it is an American usage but it seems to be coming more prominent in this country.  Terry Wogan’s listeners recently claimed that they had heard of Nursery School children who would be having a leaving prom this summer before moving on to their next school.

DANCE - again, ball in the sense of gathering for dancing.

These were all smashed into real words as shown in the table below.

When the grid was full, the concept of Wimbledon was firmly entrenched in my mind so I went searching for Ws.  There was only one towards the north west corner and I was able to trace out WIMBLEDN in an anticlockwise direction in adjacent two letter horizontal and vertical chunks.  This was balanced by FRTNIGHT in a clockwise direction in the symmetric south east corner. Both words were shaped as balls.  The missing letter was clearly O - more references to balls.

At this point, I was slightly confused as to whether I should draw one or two circles (or balls) to join WIMBLEDN and FRTNIGHT.  In the end I went for a single ball as the preamble said draw a line, not draw lines.  Also this circle was centred exactly in the middle of the grid.

I solved this in a couple of sessions of a couple of hours each.  I took some time to get going.  Although some of the misprints stood out clearly, others did not.  The misprinted clues were by no means evenly spread through the fourty four possibilities.  Also some ‘obvious’ misprints weren’t misprints at all.

Overall this was an enjoyable puzzle with a very topical theme and a number of clues that gave satisfaction when I cracked them.

This was a fairly gentle puzzle from Schadenfreude - the challenge was to idenitfy the empty cells where the cause and effect were to be entered, “thus thwarting an attempt to save the planet”. We were also told that after doing so, the grid entries would all be real words. It fairly soon became apparent that the across answers were all entered normally and the empty cells were the two complete rows of unchecked letters in down answers. The “real word” possibilities for these answers soon showed that the cause was CARBON DIOXIDE and the effect GLOBAL WARMING. I don’t really get the “thwarting” bit (to me, ‘thwarting’ is a deliberate action rather than the side effect which the carbon dioxide has been historically) - so I wonder whether there’s something else going on that I haven’t spotted.

I didn’t time the puzzle but would guess at about 90 minutes. In down answers below, I’ve indicated the inserted letter in lower case.