Wordless Wednesday: Jurassic Park In The Dark (And Snow!)

Twelve Months In Jurassic Park

Since everyone else seems to be doing these end-of-the-year reviews, here's what's been going on in the garden for the past 365 days. I'm curling up with a cup of tea to welcome in the new year now.

January


The gardening year got off to a great start with my purchase of the fountain (with money and vouchers from my family for Christmas 2008). It's taken the garden from being mainly visual and tactile and added an auditory aspect.

February


SNOW!!!!!!!

March


Karma the Camellia flowered, showing me that I had managed to keep it watered enough over the summer to get buds forming.

April


The garden started to green up and come back to life, and April was really when it started to be pleasant sitting out in the garden in the evenings.

May


I briefly turned my attention to the front borders, and made a half-arsed attempt to brighten things up. I've been adding bits and pieces since, and there's a possibility that it might look quite nice by next spring!

June


José the Agave decided to indulge in a bit of asexual reproduction, and currently has three "kids", which will leave home as soon as someone lends me a set of leather gauntlets and a welder's mask.

July


I furnished myself with a small pond (a glazed pot with a cork in the bottom), some floating ferns and a Saururus cernuus, and this little pond really burst into life about a month after I filled it.

August


Starting to run out of space in Jurassic Park, I decided to make use of the third dimension and go up, up, up! The result was the Hanging Gardens of Isleworth.

September


For some reason I didn't take any photos of the garden this month. However, I did get some photos around the college where I teach now, and revelled in its great botanical and horticultural link.

October


As autumn drew in, I decided to indulge in some hard landscaping, and using some slabs from my parents, I made myself a patio.

November


Sorting out the indoor part of Jurassic Park, I was pleasantly surprised at how well everything was doing, not least because I nearly lost the Zamia furfuracea six months earlier!

December


And this was what Jurassic Park looked like earlier in December (and probably will do until early March!).

Have a good one folks, hope your Musas survive the winter, and let's do some great gardening in 2010!

Shiny And New

I hope you've all had a very happy Christmas. I have overindulged (as usual), and let's just say I shan't be cooking pheasant for Christmas dinner again unless charcoal-lined underpants appear in both mine and Hubster's stockings. As far as gardening swag goes, I did fairly well - Hubster renewed my subscription to Gardeners' World, and scored me a free set of loppers. His little brother gave me Christopher Lloyd's "Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners", which I have been devouring, and Hubster and his older brother clubbed together to buy me a new greenhouse!


I was in desperate need of a new one - one of the zips on the old one no longer worked and I was running out of space. As you can see, I've managed to get a whole lot more in - all my pots, compost and mulches are in, along with a number of plants. Most importantly, the greenhouse has been able to accommodate José Cuervo, the Agave tequilana.


I was allowed to assemble it before Christmas to get the Agave in, but I'm a little worried that it's too late. We had a bit of snow 10 days ago, and although I shoved a bit of fleece over the top to protect José I've spotted a bit of leaf damage. The temperature hasn't been below -4°C in the Tropic of Isleworth, so I have everything crossed that I got the chap into shelter in time.

We just couldn't get the Agave indoors again this year - it's grown a fair bit, and both of us are trying to save our backs from any further injury. What say you in the blogosphere - will José be alright in the greenhouse until March or so?

All we managed to bring in for winter was Zamia furfuracea, Encephalartos princeps and Asplenium bulbiferum. Everything else has been left outside, either fleeced or ignored. Still, a dead plant is but a space ready to be filled with a new one in the spring...

The Festive Season's Forgotten Victims

It's Christmas in less than two weeks' time, and turkeys all over the British Isles are starting to get nervous.


There is rarely any shortage of jokes acknowledging the humble turkey's ultimate sacrifice for our dinner plates. But what of the conifers?

I confess to getting a bit nervous at this time of year, as I'm sure the owners of pet turkeys and chickens do. Will my beloved Wollemia nobilis be nicked by some feckless youths and turned into a Christmas tree? It would look really rubbish - I know because I put baubles on it the year it spent the winter indoors, and the branches are just not rigid enough to take the weight. I have a friend who threatens to hold my Wollemi pine to ransom if I so much as dare decorate the Agave tequilana like I did last year.

So I empathised completely with Randall Hitchin at the University of Washington Botanical Garden, grieving for the theft of a rare tree, Keteleeria evelynia. No doubt the thieves who cut down the tree had no idea of its botanical significance, and apparently it won't even look like a "proper" Christmas tree, on account of its open, sparse branches.

This year my Wollemia is still fleeced up for the winter - not because it isn't hardy (it's been through 18 ice ages!), but to provide some disguise as our garden is overlooked by a public car park and I don't want it catching someone's eye over the next fortnight!

Magnolia Or No Magnolia?

I have very kindly been given a plant by a friend. He has identified it as Magnolia grandiflora, but I'm not so sure. I have a M. grandiflora, and it doesn't look particularly like the new plant.


So on the left is a leaf from the definite M. grandiflora, and on the right is a leaf from the new plant.


And on the right is the M. grandiflora, and on the left and middle are the new plant.

They don't look very much like each other do they? Any thoughts?

Bedtime

Today was a beautiful and icy cold day with not much wind. A perfect day for finally fleecing up the less hardy (or just expensive) plants. So here we are:


Poor old Bastard the Cycad has been trussed up and fleeced (he looked ghastly after last winter, so I'm trying to minimise the damage). The Phoenix canariensis is also fleeced (my least favourite job of all).


Dicksonia antarctica and Washingtonia robusta are looking cosy too.


And Brahea armata, Bastard II, Cyathea cooperi, Blechnum tabulare, Tetrapanax "Rex" and Wollemi nobilis complete the set. These are all drawstring fleece covers from Wilkinsons, and they're so much easier than getting rolls of fleece instead.

I'm probably being overprotective this year, but after last year's carnage I'm not particularly inclined to take the risk! It's looking a bit miserable now, but I console myself with the fact that the conifers really come into their own about this time of year, and it's probably the only point where they're really visible in all their glory.

And speaking of glory, here's the prize bloom in my garden, Hubsterus buttocksi, emptying the fountain.


Brightens up one's day no end, doesn't it?

Babies At Kew

A visit to Kew Gardens beckoned last Saturday. I always love the glasshouses: the Temperate House for the unusual conifers and the Princess Of Wales Conservatory for the incredible fern sections, but it's the Palm House which was most exciting. My favourite cycad of all time, Encephalartos horridus, the ferocious blue cycad (the reasons for this should be obvious), was in fine form:


But wait, what's this I see?


It's a pup on the E. horridus!!

In fact, we counted four of them:


I would LOVE it if these were ever commercially available, but I think there is a greater chance of an asteroid destroying Earth than of me getting a CITES-protected cycad. So I had to make do with photos, and a bit of a feel:


At this stage, the pups were still really soft - even the ends didn't have sharp spikes on them. I suspect this was how dinosaurs ate similar specimens. I don't think, if I was a dinosaur, that I'd have attempted to eat them otherwise!

Indoor Gardening

It is November, and as a result far too minging to spend too much time outside in the garden. Fortunate, then, that it has been mild enough that I haven't needed to fleece up any plants yet (I'm not looking forward to that task!).

So today I dealt with the indoor component of Jurassic Park. Firstly, disposing of the pathetic excuse for a rubber plant I had rotting in the corner of the living room...


Compare this with what it looked like eleven months ago. I thought these chaps were meant to be so tough one could, in theory, abandon them in the corner of a room and barely water them for six months and they would still thrive.

Then the Araucaria heterophylla and Nephrolepis exaltata needed bigger pots, and the fountain needed cleaning and refilling.


They've now joined the Zamia furfuracea, Dioon edule and Asplenium nidus. And over on the right hand side of the picture is Caryota mitis, absolutely thriving.

And now my nose is all bunged up from the dusting (a sign that I should never do any cleaning if I can help it). Meh.

Family Jewels

At the Squires Garden Centre in Twickenham (home of some of the best gingerbread men outside of Market Drayton), there is a large Wollemia nobilis. And it's got its 'nads out at the moment!


This one is a male - rather appropriately, the male cones are long and thin, and the female cones are rounder. And it's not yet ripe - compare with the male cone I saw at Syon Park back in April:


I am wondering, given that I haven't seen a female cone yet, whether the vast majority of Wollemi pines in cultivation are male. If so, where are all the girlies? I would have thought it was important to have as many female plants as possible for propagation - are the female plants being kept back in the nurseries for this very purpose?

Look What I Made!

A few weeks ago, my parents dispatched me back home with a dozen large paving slabs for Jurassic Park. On Friday I decided I would finally do something with it, by making myself a patio.


Now, living in rented accommodation and all, and with only a patch of ground in the communal garden, I couldn't really do a proper paving job, so it was down to a few bags of sharp sand and a heavy Hubster to jump up and down.


I have some wobbly slabs, but they're much more stable to put the table and chairs on than the gravel was. And weirdly enough it now seems that there's more space - I haven't removed any plants but there's more room to get around the table and chairs and even a bit of space for more plants. How on earth did that happen?


After a pretty decent summer in Jurassic Park where all I needed to do was to relax and enjoy being in the garden, the jobs have picked up a bit. The Metasequoia is starting to change colour (and my coffee tree and tulip tree are already naked and twig-like), and you can see I have a new Magnolia grandiflora to plant up!


It's difficult not to start feeling some degree of melancholy (not least because October ended with sunshine, light winds and mild temperatures, giving way to a squally November that does not inspire the act of gardening) - some of my ferns are starting to die back already, my deciduous trees will soon be nothing but twigs, and I am already fighting a losing battle against maple leaves. So I will be looking for ways to brighten up the garden over the winter, to encourage me and Hubster to sit out, perhaps lit by torches and fairy lights, with large steaming mugs of hot chocolate...