Triffids And Other Scary Plants

A while ago, the BBC News had an article about our enduring love-affair with man-eating plants. I'm ashamed to say that, despite having some absolutely terrifying plants in Jurassic Park, I have never read The Day Of The Triffids. Perhaps someone will be kind to me for my birthday in six weeks' time... Hubster has read it and seen the film, and as a result was terrified of his father's rhubarb patch, and even gave my Gunnera a wide berth before I managed to overwater it to death.


I have also never seen either of the films of The Little Shop Of Horrors, although I am very familiar with the song "Feed Me"...


At the moment I think my Tetrapanax "Rex" has a fight on its hands for the title of "largest plant in Jurassic Park" next summer, as the Geranium maderense, which looked so sweet and innocent when I was given it in a 4" pot back in May, has leaves as big as my head...

The BBC reckons the fascination is there because of genetically modified foods and bio-engineering. But I think it's more basic than that. Now, the Hubster may have his own ideas about horror, writing the genre himself (after a fashion), but I've always found that the most terrifying things are either the mundane and day-to-day or the totally alien. Looking at the IMDB's top 50 horror films, for example, "Psycho" is based on a little country motel that could be anywhere in America. Almost anyone who has been on a US roadtrip has stayed somewhere they have darkly referred to as "The Bates Motel" (there's a motel near the bus station in Cheyenne, WY...). But "Alien" is completely unfamiliar - it's away from all home comforts, and the monster has a strange Bauplan and physiology.

Where do plants come into it? Probably the perfect combination of both extremes. There are plants all over the place. Unless you live in an inner city you can probably look out of your window right now and see a plant, and probably more plants than animals (at least visible to the naked eye). We see plants every day - what could be more terrifying than those plants uprooting and going on the rampage? But as familiar as plants are, their anatomy is almost as far away from our own as we see among multi-celled organisms on this planet.

Personally, I'm freaked out by Mimosa pudica.


There's a whole load of them at the local Wyevale at the moment, and a brush of the hand across the display causes them all to recoil. Frankly, any plant that can shy away from me is true horror film material. But I'm sure I'm not the only gardener who has one plant they just can't cope with. What's your secret triffid?

To 2009 And Beyond

This was what Jurassic Park looked like this time last year (well, 26 December 2007 to be precise - I love Picasa!):


And this is what it looked like just over a week ago, from a similar angle (before the water feature arrived):


I'm delighted with the progress of the garden over the year. It has gone from being a collection of plants in pots to being a real garden, which now has a seating area, a water feature, hanging baskets, and will soon have some screening to enclose it a bit more, hopefully.

My big successes of the year have been finding the bargain Agave tequilana, getting the Brainea insignis to grow a single frond, being able to buy the fountain, germinating some Arisaema tortuosa seeds (they just came through a few days ago) and joining the Hardy Tropicals forum. And of course, starting this blog and having such a good reception for it.

Failures? Well, have a look:


That's Tsuga canadensis, Banksia spinulosa "Birthday Candles" and Leucospermum "Scarlet Ribbons" in the "morgue". The two proteas will stay until their more lively compatriots start to grow in the spring, and if they don't follow suit then I shall compost them. The Tsuga has one green branch left on it near the base. If that survives and starts to grow, then I may be able to prune it severely and carry on.

I also killed the gorgeous Abies nordmanniana that you can see in the very first picture in this post. And I managed to overwater a Gunnera, although when I told a friend about this, he said of the mutual acquaintance who divided his plant for me, "Well, he probably gave you a dud Gunnera"! I shall try again with another Gunnera this year.

I may also have lost my lovely witch hazel. There are no flower buds on it at all, and it really should be showing some signs of flowering by now! I would be most unhappy about that, as it was some very welcome winter colour last year.

Still, onward and upward into the new year - the days are getting longer, the plants are getting stronger. May you all have a happy and prosperous new year. May the vine weevils and slugs be suitably scared away, may the cats not crap on your gravel, and may the squirrels not eat your tree ferns.

PS: If any of you are heading to Kew Gardens tomorrow for their free entry day, I may see you there. Look out for the girl in the bright pink hat running round the Evolution House, with the bewildered husband following behind complaining about the cold and how he wants a coffee.

Life Imitating Art

Tesco have just got their stock of mahoosive houseplants in, for £10 a pot. And although I'm not really supposed to go for younger angiosperm groups, what I do like about them is that they grow fast and they're nice and green. They're also dirt cheap. I wouldn't be able to get a 5ft conifer or fern for £10 even in Tesco.


As you can see I picked out a decent specimen (I think it's a variegated Dieffenbachia but it's not primitive enough for me to have a good idea...), and as I put it in the trolley I got into a conversation with another woman shopping.

We talked about what a lovely plant it was, how vivid the variegation was and what a good deal £10 was for such instant colour and presence in the room, particularly when Christmas is all over and the tree is taken down.


And then she paused, looked at the plant, and said thoughtfully: "You're going to need a bigger pot."

I had to stop myself giggling!

It's Mine

I lasted about ten minutes at Wisley on Saturday until I ascertained that the only water features available were water butts with old-fashioned pumps on them. But never fear, it was back to good old Squires, where I think I horrified the poor lad in Pets & Aquatics by wanting to buy a fountain in December.

The thing weighed 26kg and very nearly didn't fit into my old banger Christine. But we made it home and wheeled it round to the back. I rewarded Hubster with a couple of Krispy Kreme doughnuts (which should be available on the NHS), and then set to work building it. I felt just like Charlie Dimmock (with significantly more scaffolding...).

And here it is in all its glory!


There's a video of it working here (I might not recommend it if your bladder is feeling a bit full...).

It's been drained again so as not to split the polyfibre if it ices up, and I'll fill it up when the frosts are gone in March or so (I love living in Zone 9a!). I think I'll be moving a couple of ferns around so that (as Northern Shade suggested) they can frame the cascade.

And then I should probably have stopped. But I was determined to make sure the flex could fit between the door and doorframe. Ideally we would have had a file or a chisel, or some useful tool. But we didn't. However, we did have a junior hacksaw, a hammer and a few screwdrivers.

Well, there's now a really nice notch in the doorframe, and the flex fits through with plenty of room. The transformer can go on the wall in the back hall and the plug will be routed through a timer in the kitchen. There's also a really nice notch in my thumb, middle finger and ring finger.


This is probably why Hubster doesn't let me do DIY.

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Happy Christmas to all my readers, and I'm so sorry I haven't had a chance to come round and individually wish you all the best.


This was José Cuervo the Agave all decked out for Christmas in the hideous white snowball baubles that Hubster loves so much. We do have a real Christmas tree (by which I mean a pine-shaped artificial pre-lit tree), but José looks damn cute.

It's a bit late, but if you have a spare £120 next year, why not head to the massive National Geographic store on Regent Street, London, where you can buy a Wollemia nobilis or two:


Right, time to baste the Gallus gallus, wrap the bags of Sus domestica in other yummy bits of Sus domestica, start roasting the Solanum tuberosum and Pastinaca sativa and get the various cultivars of Brassica oleracea ready to boil.

If any of you are braving the Wisley sale on Saturday I will see you there. I got a good haul of garden vouchers so it's a good time to scout out a suitably Jurassic-looking water feature.

Hope Christmas is a happy time for all of you. With love and my best wishes (and Hubster's too),

Julia xxx

Banananananananananananana

As Emma said the other week, we're finally getting some decent frosts, and so it was finally time to wrap up my Ensete ventricosum Maurelii bananas. They're not Jurassic, but they look ace and they were given to me by some lovely HTUK people, so I shall see how they get on.

This was one of my once-proud bananas:


All floppy from the frost and looking rather sorry for itself.


So I trimmed off the two big floppy leaves, leaving one complete leaf and a rolled up leaflet in the middle. I constructed a frame (well, "constructed" is a bit ambitious - more shoving three canes in the soil) for the fleece:


In the absence of straw I shoved as much paper shredding in as I could (on the basis that it can't ALL get soggy and wet):


And then piled the fleece on top and strapped it all in.


Do not copy me - I am sure straw is much better than shredded paper (although its the best use of my old mobile phone bills ever), and really you need chicken wire. This was just what I decided to do. I may have liquidised bananas come March, or they may have survived okay. We shall see!

Friday Fern #25

Okay, this is the last one of these for a bit. I'm running out of new ferns and my existing ones aren't putting out much growth right now! But this is one of my favourites, and it's definitely the Little Fern That Could.


This is Athyrium niponicum pictum "Ursula's Red". I bought it in honour of my best friend, who fortunately enough happens to be called Ursula. I actually got two plug plants, but one of them went into my bottle garden and hasn't done at all well. The larger one, however, remained in a pot in my growhouse (having survived some squirrel attacks it was happier removed from the vicious rodents' reach). And doesn't it look good?

It's finally getting that red stem, and hopefully some of the colour will deepen over the next year.

Garden Totty

When the garden has been fleeced up and put to bed for the winter, one's eyes turn to things other than the plants for visual stimulation. And on Sunday I got to letch a bit at a very fine specimen of Homo sapiens glasguensis.


That's Hubster's cute little butt, turning the compost heap for me. The compost didn't look bad either:


I'm wondering if I can persuade him to dress like the rather fit male model adorning the pages of the Garden Tribe catalogue. Wearing nothing but a hat, a pair of tight jeans and a toolbelt.

Yum...

Don't Stop The Carnival

Despite my stunned silence on here for the past 10 days, I managed to produce enough earlier in November to merit a couple of mentions in this month's Berry Go Round carnival.

Christopher has done a really excellent job, and found some pretty photos of ginkgo seed coats (I shall not be lazy again!) to accompany the tale of my earlier encounter.

I've been really quiet on here because I'm desperately trying to find a job. I really wanted a new job before I went away to the USA, but now I really need a new job! So it's job application after job application, and I tell you when you've spent all day filling in for the fifteenth time an example of a time when you showed leadership skills it's as much as you can do not to defenestrate the computer, let alone write something nice about the garden you have barely seen in the past fortnight!