Bad Blogger

Agh, a week between blog posts. How naughty of me, and I haven't even had the decency to reply to my comments. Well, I have decamped into a Starbucks in between job interviews (go me) with my trusty handbag-sized laptop in an attempt to rectify this.

On Saturday it was a HTUK outing to Kew Gardens. We spent the best part of the day there, visiting the Princess of Wales Conservatory for the Tropical Extravaganza twice. I loved the colour combinations of the orchids and bromilliads, but did find the present shapes a little confusing:


Being a little allergic to flowers anyway from a gardening perspective, I much preferred the ferns and the palm house, especially this Platycerium superbum lurking at the very end of the POW Conservatory - it's ginormous!!


Still ugly as far as ferns go though...

The cycad display at one end of the palm house was gorgeous. One day I will have more than three cycads!


And hopefully for people who haven't been inside the palm house, this might give you a little bit of an idea of what it's like (i.e. awesome):


In the temperate house I satisfied my Gondwanan gymnosperm fetish, and got some ideas for arranging different ferns in the New Zealand section:


I made everyone go in the Evolution house:


And desperately tried to explain to everyone why it is that I love ferns, cycads and conifers so much:




And while I like my tropical plants, my gymnosperms especially, I can still appreciate a stunning display of crocuses:


It's displays like that that make me want to break into "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park":

Spring is here! Ah spring is here!
Life is skittles and life is beer!
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring! I do! Don't you? Course you do!
And you know, I think spring might be here.

It's Not A Butterfly!

For Christmas, my best friend Usch bought me a real Ginkgo biloba leaf, copper- and silver-plated. It came on a small ribbon, to be hung as a tree ornament, but I thought "nuts to that" and bought a silver chain to thread it on so I could wear it as a necklace.


It has had so many compliments, and about half of them came when I was at the RHS Halls on Tuesday. So many people think it's a butterfly though! Most notably my mother refused to accept that it was a ginkgo leaf, and argued that it was a butterfly until my father said it looked like a Rorschach inkblot of someone killing their mother.

What do you think? Would it be more obviously ginkgo-like if it had the more "normal" bilobed leaf? I think that would make it look more butterfly-like (well, more moth-like). I really love being able to wear actual leaves as jewellery, and regardless of whether people think it's a butterfly or a ginkgo, at least people think it's a gorgeous necklace!

Meet Mr Stabby

This was my bargain of the month, a pretty large Cunninghamia lanceolata for a fiver, courtesy of Southcombe Nursery.


I have now checked it out on Dave's Garden and discovered that it's a fair bit hardier than the tag suggested (I don't think I need to fleece up a conifer hardy down to zone 6b - I doubt London has been considered zone 6b since the last ice age).


This photo is a little blurry, but it shows the gorgeous colours. It looks like a more delicate Araucaria araucana, but is even spikier, hence me deciding (on examining my pin-pricked and bleeding hands when I got home) to name it Mr Stabby. Hubster will be happy enough learning that name.

I think I experienced a very tiny aspect of being a parent of a newborn though. Children do not feature anywhere in my future with Hubster, by mutual consent. Pretty much the only things that make me occasionally jealous of mothers are the guaranteed seat on the train and the overwhelming approval, delight and interest of complete strangers.

Well, I didn't get a seat on the train (although Mr Stabby did exact some revenge for this), but I did get approval, delight and interest from complete strangers. I was stopped about half a dozen times within the RHS halls so people could ooh and ahh over the plant, ask if they could note the name, was it as prickly as it looked (yes, more so in fact), where did I get it, was it hardy, where was I going to put it? And it wasn't just fellow plant nuts. I was stopped in Clapham Junction station. The guy at Krispy Kreme wanted to know all about it (while persuading me that I wanted a chocolate iced with sprinkles doughnut with my coffee).

Tragically, getting a £5 conifer seems to have been the single thing I have done with my life that society has thoroughly approved of!

RHS In London

I took yesterday afternoon off to go to the RHS London Flower Show. It was my first time ever at the Horticultural Halls, so I geeked out a bit by taking photos of the halls themselves.


This was the entrance to Lawrence Hall, a magnificent art-deco building.


And it looked even more fabulous inside. I wasn't as impressed with Lindley Hall, across the road.


I liked two of the front garden designs. I'm a bit of a sucker for blue lights as an accent in any garden (I can't wait for there to be enough sunlight for my blue solar lights to charge up!):


And Hubster officially wants one of the Gnewt electric scooters being exhibited in this garden:


I did drool over the Crug Farm display, but I'm not a big fan of Schefflera, and they didn't have a single non-flowering plant. I enjoyed Burncoose Nursery's exhibit, and am looking forward to perhaps being able to buy a Podocarpus "Blaze" sometime in the future.

And World Of Ferns had the sort of display I could have spent my whole salary at. New Blechnum varieties, loads of unusual Doodia, and more Pteris varieties than I could possibly cram in my bathroom:


Sadly they hadn't brought any Polystichum andersonii as "they're looking really tatty at this time of year". I guess I shall just have to order off the internet instead.

I did come away with a new leaf-baby though. I'll introduce you later.

RHS Plant And Design Show

I've got myself a half day tomorrow, so I can go to the Plant and Design Show at the RHS Halls. I've never been there before, but I'm really looking forward to it. I shall take furious notes and as many photos as I can!

Any fellow garden-bloggers going, who might like to meet up for a coffee? I'm planning to get there about 2pm and leave when my feet start hurting. You'll spot me by the lurid pink knitted hat...

Birthday Loot

After all the excitement of yesterday's Darwin Day, Le Jour de Julia isn't quite as spiffy. Still, I have done extremely well out of the day so far. Hubster has renewed my RHS membership, and is taking me to Wisley tomorrow to see the butterflies in the glasshouse (I'm hoping that parents will make the wise decision not to take Tarquel and Jocasta there on Valentine's Day and that it will be a relatively peaceful grown-up environment. Yeah, right...).

My parents bought me Will Giles' book Encyclopaedia of Exotic Plants for Temperate Climates and some new gardening gloves (with matching secateurs - one can never have enough pairs of secateurs). My little brother got me Day Of The Triffids (so I can understand why Hubster won't turn his back on my Gunnera) and The Gardeners' Book. And Hubster's entire family have very generously contributed to the cost of me doing the KLC Designing With Plants course. Because, you know, I felt I had too much free time, what with the full-time job and the PhD... It will be great fun, and give me a few more options when trying to get out of my Boring Office Job ^TM.

Anyway, because it's my birthday, I want to make a birthday wish. And my wish is that Amanda win the scholarship. So, for me *big puppy dog eyes*, please vote!

What's Your Favorite Toy? Brickfish

Vote early and vote often. You can do it every eight hours. Which, when you get to my age, anything at that frequency is pretty good!

Darwin And Compost

  
While I am sure that, at least for British readers, the fact that 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On The Origin Of Species" (as the BBC have been making quite a big thing of it), many of you may be unaware that today is a very special day for evolutionary biologists: Darwin Day.

Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 (hence the celebrations today). He is most famous for his theory of evolution and natural selection, but he was also a very talented geologist, and quite the polymath. While I was researching for some posts on the other blog, I came across a book that I had never heard of!

It would appear that Darwin wrote a book called The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Actions of Worms, With Observations On Their Habits. Now, dear old Darwin - the only criticism I have of his writing is that he never used one word where six would do the job just as well, and his long-ass book titles are no exception. You can read the whole book online at the link I have given you, but you're probably going to need to be really, really keen, or quite an insomniac.

Darwin recognised the importance of worms in the breaking down of organic matter. This is something we rather take for granted now when we garden. We attract worms to our compost heap. Hubster goes round collecting worms to put in the heap (although he does leave one or two out for the vicious little red-breasted dinosaurs that hang out around our garden). You can buy wormeries to break down your old food and grass cuttings and paper shreddings. Worms adore cellulose. It's like Ben & Jerry's ice cream for them.

So, if you're spending this weekend turning the compost heap or mucking out the wormery, raise your cup of tea to Charlie and toast his wormy observations...

In Defence Of The Monkey Puzzle Tree

In the gardening circles in which I move, I get a fair amount of stick for my love of conifers. A few weeks ago, I got "Ugh, I hate conifers. They're so ugly"! And this really surprises me. What is the issue with conifers? I know there are problems with the Leylandii thugs, but other conifers are available. Metasequoia glyptostroboides is a breathtakingly majestic tree at any size. The colour of Picea pungens, the blue spruce, is exquisite. And an awful lot of people invite one into their homes in December!

And one of my favourites is Araucaria araucana, the monkey puzzle tree. Love it. Love, love, love it. So imagine my distress! Yolanda at Bliss hates them with a passion!! This is my attempt to redress the balance, and counter the albeit laugh-out-loud criticism of such a noble tree.


Is there another tree so perfectly symmetrical? From a distance they look like they're made of dark green pipe cleaners.

And as well as these wiry green pyramids, there are the trees that have lost their lower branches, and now look like giant chimney brushes!


These particular varieties were used to great effect in the ground-breaking TV series "Walking With Dinosaurs":


And as you will see, it is perfectly possible to hug a monkey puzzle tree if it is one of the bare-trunked varieties. And I did hug the one above, at Chatsworth House. It's not as nice to hug as a Sequoiadendron giganteum, but it suffices.

Now, the leaves - they're like stroking a shark. If you stroke from trunk to tip, they're fine. If you stroke the other way, you can say goodbye to the palms of your hands. But does that make them any less beautiful?


Hell no. This was my desktop image for quite some time. My mind boggles at the mathematical calculations that would be needed to replicate this artificially. Isn't it wonderful though?

So I won't hear a bad word against monkey puzzle trees. They have held on for millions of years, so they must be doing something right. Members of the Araucaria genus provided a decent high-energy food source for high-browsing sauropods like Brachiosaurus. and since these high-browsers were the largest land animals ever to have existed, that's quite an achievement on the part of these trees.

I adore conifers. My Gondwanan gymnosperm fetish compels me to furnish Jurassic Park with conifers. So if any of you have an Araucaria araucana that you don't want, please dig it up and send it to me. It will be very happy in my garden!

Winter Planting: Ur Doin It Rite

This was the park next to Richmond Bridge a couple of weeks ago.


See, Royal Parks? That is how to plant a border for specific winter interest. Don't blast us with false bright colours and dull-as-dishwater municipal planting. Let us see the natural colours of winter.

I couldn't get a good photo of the whole garden as the light was fading fast at that time of day. It's a shame, because the whole garden was tiered up to the bridge in shades of green, grey, gold and brown.

More Snow Pictures

In and around building snow-dinosaurs, I did get some photos of Jurassic Park itself. This was Bastard under at least three inches of snow:


Can you spot my fountain on the right hand side?


There's a Cordyline australis, a Gunnera manicata and a few Gondwanan gymnosperms under there, and Bastard II fleeced up with a layer of snow on top!


This was the pristine lawn before it very rapidly became not pristine...


And that was my other neighbour's garden:


Of course then carnage ensued as the lawn was destroyed in favour of snow-dinosaur building, but then the lawn is hardly a bowling green and is pretty much there so the landlord doesn't have to be more imaginative. It's probably nothing a dusting of grass-seed and a pair of seven-league boots won't fix.

Snow Day!!!

We have six inches of snow here. This isn't an awful lot on the grand scheme of things (especially not to my Canadian readers), but London is USDA Zone 9a. Things have ground to a halt the same way they would if Miami, San Antonio or Los Angeles were under half a foot of snow with more forecast. We rarely get snow, and it hardly ever settles in the city.

So this is what met me at 7.30am when I was making the morning tea and coffee:


This is outside the back door. On the left are my proteas under fleece, and on the right are the few succulents and spikeys I have!


You can see the depth of snow quite well on my little patio table, and it's all drifted up against the pots:


But this little chappy was quite at home:


The apple tree looked gorgeous in the snow:


Hubster and I are having sausage butties for breakfast, and then heading out to make snow-dinosaurs. Both our offices are shut down as the tubes are out, the buses are all cancelled and only a nutter would drive a 1.1 engine Punto in this weather!

More Water

I got a mini version of my big fountain for the indoor Jurassic park.


It looks great all lit up. The only problem is, since we turned on the water, both Hubster and I have been dashing to the toilet every half hour or so!