Brahea Surgery

I was finally able to pot up the Brahea armata in one of the nice tall metal pots Homebase have. But what a difficult, stressful and possibly fatal (for the palm) task. The little bugger had pushed thick roots through the drainage holes, which had expanded, making it impossible to remove the rootball intact. And interfering with the rootball is, as I keep being told, effectively murder. Brahea are notoriously sensitive to any root disturbance, but it was also clear that the palm would also suffer if I just sunk the pot into the bigger pot.

I tried to cut the pot away, using my ratcheted secateurs and Hubster's box-cutters, but that just didn't work. My brother, visiting from the Grim North, suggested heating the pot to soften the plastic, but we figured that there was heat tolerance and there was heat tolerance, and sticking it on the barbecue was not a good idea.

So there was nothing for it - the six or seven roots sticking out of the holes had to come off. I'm bricking myself hoping that six or seven is okay. Hubster and I did manage to remove a fair bit of the compost from around the root ball and get hands in underneath to pull out the rest of it intact.

Effectively it's now in intensive care. It's going to get a very regular watering with seaweed and Palmbooster, in the hope that this minimises the damage and eases its recovery. One thing that's reassured me is anecdotal evidence that palms in pots are better at dealing with violations like I've committed than palms going into the ground. And the knowledge that there is at least one HTUKer who has abused their B. armata far more than I have - and it's survived!

Repost 9 August 2007: Garden Update

My husband's sense of humour is dry, quite dark and devilishly clever. 95% of the time at least. The other 5% of the time it's things like this that appeal:



I've been trying to get hold of a "Paul's Giant" Pennisetum since then. Knoll Gardens are the only people I've found selling it, and they're anticipating more stock at the end of this month. He also finds Mammillaria cacti hilarious, sniggers like a boy half his age if I mention Morning Glory, and I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel when I introduced him to a Dyckia frigida.

Just an amusing insight into the Hubster's view of the plant kingdom to accompany an otherwise rather boring repost...

I have just acquired a Washingtonia robustus and a Cupressus macrocarpa for the garden. I tried to get hold of a Juniperus communis "Golden Shower", because I thought it would appeal to the Hubster's puerile sense of humour, but it was not to be.

Photos soon.

Friday Fern #7

Time for a mystery fern here.



This was one I grabbed from the Burncoose Nurseries stand at the Chelsea Flower Show. Basically because it looked pretty. And it does. It's very delicate, very feathery, the fronds unfurl with a white fuzz on them. And it seems to enjoy living behind my potatoes.

Haven't a scoobies what it is though. It looks a little bit like my poly-poly (Polystichum polyblepharum), but the poly-poly is far more robust than this chap. Plus, mystery fern does something that the poly-poly hasn't (at least so far):



As ferns are not well known for their side shoots, or their ability to propagate from a frond, these are obviously young epiphytic plants, yes? Awesome stuff - use Mummy as a substrate. When I potted it up, there were a couple of nice big young plants, so I hacked them off and had them in a saucer of water, pending me figuring out what the heck to do with them (the photo below is blurry, you don't need your eyes tested - well maybe you do, but only if everything else is blurry too).



I don't know that I've progressed much further, other than to fill the saucer with a leftover bit of moss, in the hope that the young plants will contemplate a root system so I can propagate them properly and then distribute them at forum meets in return for much rarer stuff. Clearly I have a lot to learn about fern cultivation. And let's not even think about spores yet!

My Green Bits

Emma wants us to post our big green leaves, so here are some of the green things that make me happy in my garden.

Dicksonia antarctica crozier:



Polystichum tsussimense frond:


Top of Agave tequilana:



Close-up of Asplenium scolopendrium:



Old versus new Dicksonia antarctica:



And finally, loads of apple-green leaves and branches on Wollemia nobilis:



Now, don't you feel calmer and happier for looking at those?

Disgraced Gunnera

Yes, that brown tuft sitting in the large pot is what remains of my Gunnera. It was in a large pot, getting plenty of water (to the point of considerably boggy conditions), getting sun only from about 4pm onwards. First one leaf went droopy, then another went droopy. Hubster thought this was a clever ploy to grow the leaves down to the ground so it could heave itself up and come after him. Hubster is still traumatised by triffids, so having a Gunnera really hasn't helped matters.

Possible reasons for it drooping included too much sun, too little water, too much food, too little food, too little space, too much space and it just not liking me. Suffice to say, I think I have the only boggy, marginal plant that has taken umbrage at too much water. It has been put behind the compost heap to dry out, cool down, recover in the shade and see if it throws out some more leaves.

It has about two months, and if it doesn't show signs of life by then, I'll be moving it forward about four feet...

Repost 22 July 2007: The Jurassic Period Comes To West London

I like to look back on photos of how bare and minimalist my garden used to be before all the plants. I expect Hubster longs for the days when he could hang out the washing without being spiked, spored, soaked or stained by something in the garden...

This afternoon Hubster and I went shopping for some new plant pots, as the planter in which I put the artichoke my coworker gave me has no holes in the bottom, and the poor thing was waterlogged (but looking very good for it!). Of course, I'm incapable of leaving a garden centre without a plant for the garden, and today's new "leaf baby" was a Hart's Tongue fern, Asplenium scolopendrium:


So here are a few more of my darlings. First up, the Dicksonia antarctica, uneaten by the squirrels in months:


Here's the little juniper shrub I bought way back in January - Juniperus squamata "Blue Star":

My other ferns - Adiantum fragrans, the Maidenhair fern:


Dryopteris erythrosora whose fronds are red when young:


The common polypody, Polypodium vulgare, with bright orange spores under each frond:


And Polystichum tsussimense, a lovely little compact fern:


I have a Canary Island date palm, Phoenix canariensis, which has speared Hubster in his more delicate regions on many an occasion:


And of course my beautiful Wollemia nobilis:


Of course, for various reasons I've acquired a few palaeontologically incorrect angiosperms - Rosemarinus officinalis (which tastes great pushed into deep incisions on a joint of lamb...), two alpines Hypericum polyphyllum and Phlox subulata, and the little artichoke that could, Cynara scolymus:


But I want more...

Found The Cable

I found my USB cable (it was in a Safe Place), and was able to take some photos of my haul today yesterday (for some reason I fell asleep halfway through writing this at 9pm last night, and had to be put to bed by Hubster - it wasn't even dark outside!).

First off is the free conifer I was hankering after from a fellow forumer:



It's been suggested that the needles look a little like a Tsuga. I'm really not sure about that. It looks more like good old Juniperus communis, which would be awesome (as you can tell from the Agave, I like to have plants from which my favourite spirits are made, and the juniper is no exception). But because I'm an idiot I didn't take a close-up shot of the needles.

We had lunch (and several hours) at Chief Trading Post, which is absolutely full of exotic plants - there were at least two enormous greenhouses full of Dicksonia antarctica and Blechnum nudum. My one and only planty purchase from there (although Hubster did buy himself a really odd triangular reclining cushion) was a young Dicksonia squarrosa:


You'll see I've gone for a slightly different look for this chap - using moss as a mulch/top dressing rather than green slate. Since I had all that moss I thought I may as well use it - it'll hopefully be an early warning system if any of my beloved ferns are drying out, plus if I get a bit more (not all my ferns could be done today) it means if I'm away overnight I can ask Hubster to just do all the mossy ones, and he doesn't have to remember which plants are ferns.

And oh yes, saving the best until last. I'd been after one of these for a while, but the combination of Tai Haku's recent post and the incredibly good fortune I had to not only predict the size and price I was prepared to pay (10 litre pot, £30 and no more) but to get to the polytunnel before anyone else (yes, I ran) to get the best specimen, expedited my acquisition of a gorgeous Brahea armata.



There it is, in my now very overcrowded garden. I'm going to get a fourth galvanised metal pot for it, and it'll complete the square in the back right hand corner, sheltered next to the wall and my growhouse. It's Zone 9 hardy, so should be fine outside over the winter with a fleecy muffler around it.



And taking inspiration from Tai Haku, it's been christened Zoolander. It really is rather blue, isn't it? I'm going to be a bit nervous until it's in the pot, as it's the sort of palm that might catch the eye of an unscrupulous plant-napper.

And yeah, I found a bigger pot:

Room For One More?

If only forum meets and plant purchases were available on the NHS (along with Fossil Fuel ice cream and Wychwood's Hobgoblin beer). I'm just back in from another HTUK meet, with a baby Dicksonia squarrosa, an unidentified conifer (hopefully soon to be identified, but there are a couple of ideas) and something that's going to make Tai Haku very happy indeed...

And a wooden carved indeterminate dinosaur, and a strange triangular reclining cushion that Hubster fell in love with. Photos as soon as I've located the USB cable. The garden is definitely full now. I'm actually wondering if I can suspend plants from the mains water pipe.

Friday Fern #6

Here's a little gem that's pretty common in garden centres and DIY stores. It's Dryopteris erythrosora, or the Buckler fern. I don't know why it's called the Buckler fern. It looked rather sorry for itself when I bought it (the photo above was soon after I'd potted it up), although a couple of deep red fronds were on the brink of unfurling.

It looks better now (although I realised once I'd already decided I was jolly well writing about it today that I don't have a great photo of it), and is tucked behind the Wollemia in a nice shady part of the garden.



The redness of the fronds (although really they're more a coppery brown) is obvious against the Matteuccia struthiopteris behind it. And it brings a bit of colour to the garden (dirty bronze is a colour!).

Now, I'm sure I saw somewhere (and I'm really sorry to whoever wrote this - I've looked through my feeds and I can't find the original post, so please comment and link to the post if I've unwittingly plagiarised you) that a certain cycad species throws up brown young leaves, which turn green as they mature, and the writer concerned wondered if this was an adaptation to avoid predation until the leaves were established, since brown would look less hospitable to grazers.

Since the Dryopteris leaves are brown when young and turn green as they mature, the same effect could be achieved. Yay - convergent evolution in ferns and cycads!

Repost 22 June 2007: More Ginkgo Photos

Nearly a year to the day after posting the photos of the Ginkgo biloba outside Osterley tube station, here's a rather sad update:


That was what it looked like yesterday. Hasn't come into leaf at all. I thought it had shed its leaves very early last year (and the leaves were yellow even by Ginkgo standards). I don't know if it's possible for them to be dormant for a year and come back to life later, but I suspect the council workers won't let it hang around long enough to find out. How very depressing that they can survive an atom bomb but the Great West Road has been too much for this one. I really hope it hasn't been poisoned.

Inspired by comments earlier today, I took some photos of the tree when I walked home. It certainly looks very Ginkgo-like:

So while Hubster pretended he wasn't related to me, I scoured the leaves for a sign of bifurcation, and I found it:

My camera phone isn't great, but while there are one or two bifurcated leaves, most of them are undivided fans. How odd.

It seems like such a random thing, to put a single Ginkgo outside a London Underground station on one of the country's main arterial roads. I'm quite tempted to contact Hounslow Borough Council and ask them why. But that would make me a fully paid-up member of the green ink brigade.

A Boiled Vine Weevil Gathers No Moss

This morning, after my shower, I came back into the bedroom to discover a vine weevil in bed. Not happy!! We have an unwritten law in the house, that I watch the offending invertebrate intently in case it runs off somewhere, while Hubster gets an object with which to remove/kill/squash the invertebrate.

So a semi-shaven towel-clad Hubster comes running in with a small measuring cup, in light of my instructions that if he wasn't careful "the little bugger will duck and cover". Trapped in the cup, Hubster then finished it off with a good boiling.

Fact #1: Vine weevils, unlike spiders, do not go a different colour when they are boiled.

So having decided it was very much dead, Hubster inspected the damage.

Fact #2: Boiled vine weevils squidge with an audible *pop*. I don't know if raw ones do.

Incidentally, a pack of Nema-Slug (for slugs) and Nema-Sys (for vine weevils) arrived last week. Hubster kept them in the fridge while I was away, and I set loose my pretties on Sunday, to kill! kill! kill!!

Oh yes, and a work colleague has presented me with a massive bag of moss. Now, I love primitive non-vascular plants as much as the next nerd, but unless I want to ruin my landlord's lawn, I'm not sure what to do with it. I don't know if I can keep it moist enough for it to cling to the brick wall behind the garden. I might be able to get it stuck to some terracotta pots, or replace the slate around my ferns with moss.

Has anyone got any more creative ideas? I don't have any hanging baskets (can't drill into the wall). Otherwise I'll be hacking off bits to give to HTUK members.

And aren't mosses pretty? I could spend the whole day looking at these photos.

Friday Fern #5

Staying big but going rare this week for Friday Fern.


This is Blechnum tabulare. It can be confused with the much more common B. chilense but is a totally different fern (and not even as hardy as the latter). It'll form a trunk eventually, but it's not a "proper" tree fern. It gets sun in the evening, but seems to be doing pretty well for a shade-loving fern. The fronds are thick and leathery.

As Carol Klein would say, it's lovely.

And as an aside, I'm adding a new blog to the blogroll. Normally I don't make an announcement, but I'm making an exception. No Seeds, No Fruits, No Flowers: No Problem is written by a friend of Usch, my bestest friend. There are some lovely posts about all sorts of different ferns, and I'm treating it as a bit of a shopping list. I predict much poverty on my part.

I stayed with my mum and dad last night en route home from Darkest Lincolnshire, and Mum mentioned she'd like a fernery. So I'll be going home and working out what I can divide for her...

Why I Don't Have A Cat

Because I'd end up with one dumb enough to do that. I would probably come home to find it impaled on the Agave. Hubster and I contemplated it, as far as deciding a hypothetical name of Schrödinger, but no doubt with my plants the cat would be renamed Kebab.



This was our neighbours' cat. She came round to our place for peace and quiet and to be able to sit and purr on someone's knee without having to dodge the crockery being thrown during the neighbours' cocaine-fuelled arguments. The neighbours moved. I presume the cat is still alive. She loved to eat my maidenhair fern.

I'm standing in the middle of a field in darkest Lincolnshire right now. Obviously this post has been set up to go out while I'm away. So you don't get withdrawal symptoms or anything.

It's Alive!

I'm sure I'm not the only gardener who's perpetually bewildered and astounded that none (or at least very few - the Chelsea Zantedeschia has gone permanently squidgy so I think it's on its way out) of her plants are dead yet.

And amazingly enough, the polar caps on my Wollemia nobilis have "melted" and new growth is bursting forth!



Notice how the area of new growth and the area on which the robins have crapped (the fat balls are suspended directly above) are identical...

See what it looked like earlier:



And this was the cap before melting (see all the bird poo...):



I can't wait to see how much growth Matildus puts on this year round!

Bet There'll Be A Hosepipe Ban

We had some God-awful weather recently. Fortunately, we're well above the maximum flooding line of the Thames, but our overflowing gutter manages to cause its own problems. On Tuesday morning I had to move my poly-poly fern out of the way of the cascade coming from the roof.

I shoved my largest tubtrug underneath, hoping to catch at least some of the water, although I suspect it overflowed too, as it was already nearly half full by the time I got inside. But by Wednesday evening I had a good four watering cans full of low-calcium rainwater, which has to be good for the plants.

Because Bigger Pot Towers is a grade II listed building, we have an elaborate network of gutters and drains on the back of the house (this has caused problems almost every year as long as my upstairs neighbour can remember, when the gutters get clogged up and water pours through his lounge into ours). And beautiful, large, cast-iron downpipes. Look great, naff all use for siphoning off rainwater. So it gets wasted.

It pisses me off no end to see so much water wasted. There's a famous quote somewhere about how the next world war will be fought on the basis of water (actually, it might have been Hubster proselytising after a couple of glasses of pinot grigio). We waste so much of it - here's several buckets a minute falling off the roof at Clapham Junction:


And that's probably about what falls off our gutter. Into a drain, or in our case the gravel and no doubt the not-at-all-subsiding (so I am told) foundations, and then to the water table, the Thames and the sea. Eventually I suppose it'll get evaporated off, and it'll rain down again - probably in the last week of June and first week of July. And then we'll have a hosepipe ban, because while we have had loads of rain we haven't saved it in the right places.

A hosepipe ban won't affect me because I have no choice but to carry up to four watering cans full down the steps from the bathroom every time I water the garden. But I see all this good, clean (or as clean as London rain can ever be) water being wasted down the drain, while I use mains water unnecessarily. I wish I could fix a water butt to our listed downpipes, but it's never going to happen. Perhaps a carefully positioned open-top water butt would be okay, plonked under the main drips.

Then maybe I can get one of those funky pump jobs and make Hubster shower with the plug in so we can save our grey water. Do you all get frustrated by how much water is wasted like this? Apart from putting out every container possible on the lawn during a rain shower, is there any other way I can conserve more water?

Friday Fern #4

I had to go big this week and show you my Dicksonia antarctica:


There's all the new growth on it. Really big juicy fronds, which fortunately Bubba the Squirrel has stayed away from (with any luck it's because he can't be bothered or is too fat to try to climb the metal pot).



I love to see the contrast between the colours of the young leaves and last years'. The fronds are quite vertical still - hope they open out to allow a few more fronds out, because these babies are tightly stuck together!

My New Second Favourite Place

I went back to St James's Park at lunchtime today to play with the Metasequoia, and had a lovely surprise near the café - the gardeners were planting a tropical border!



The first plants I noticed were the tree ferns - almost certainly Dicksonia antarctica. Then there were the bananas (I really don't have a clue which ones, but they looked as though the HTUK crowd would be very interested in them). And some cycads - both Cycas revoluta and another odd one (possibly another Cycas that was moved while the leaves were growing?).



Chuck in a couple of date palms and it was already looking really funky even though the ground cover stuff hadn't gone in yet. It was also nice to see the gardeners seemed to be really having fun planting the stuff - I suppose borders like this make a change from the neat rows of pansies in the more municipal beds you see on roundabouts and the like.



I'm looking forward to seeing it grow into its space over the next few months (although the gardeners were saying that of course none of this is hardy and it will all be rooted up before winter - remind me to just happen to be walking past to relieve them of anything that would otherwise be chucked away!).

The Three Metasequoia Of St James Park

After a crap week at work, Hubster and I sank two LARGE margaritas and a Times Square Big Share, and went for a walk in St James Park for an hour on Friday evening. It was the first time - ever - that I'd walked through that park without needing to get somewhere, and we strolled slowly, holding hands, stopping to look at flowers, foliage and fowl. Hubster is getting more interested (or less uninterested anyway) in the natural world, and he spotted it first.

      
And then we saw two more around the lake. Beautiful feathery leaves, still a pale apple green colour:



The Metasequoia discovery was exciting, and made a perfect, relaxing evening even more fun as I ran from tree to tree to photograph it from all different angles!