Coming Alive

It's been a funny old time here, with some new beginnings all round. So to punctuate my tales of the past week or two, here are some of my babies getting ready for spring.


Blechnum tabulare knuckles
As regular readers know (and people who follow me on Twitter know only too well) I have had some issues at work and really not been too happy. For about a year I've been wondering if I should change careers, but a bit scared of doing so.


Cyrtomium falcatum
Well, the five months I was off work at the end of last year served to let Hubster and me know just how little money we needed to survive, and it was clear there was a great deal of leeway, especially if a Zone 1-4 season ticket wasn't needed!


Osmunda regalis
Eventually, just under a month ago, things reached a bit of a breaking point, so I took a leap of faith and handed in my notice, without a new job lined up. My last day at work was yesterday. I finished work at 5pm, and at 5.05pm I got a phone call offering me a new job.


Athyrium niponicum "Ursula's Red"
And this is the best bit. I am getting to be a gardener. I am actually getting to do my hobby every day and get paid for it. It's going to be hard work. I know there will be days when I'm out in the wind and the rain and I'll wish I was inside with a cup of tea, but I also know those days will be far outnumbered by all the days I've sat in an air-conditioned office and wished I was outside.

To celebrate, I bought myself a moss green Tayberry fleece. Do I know how to party or what?

Wake Up Maggie!

This time of year is one of my favourites, because it's when the deciduous Magnolia trees alert us to their presence. I adore magnolias, and have always wondered who on earth thought so little of them that they named a clinical, industrial, boring paint colour after them.

Because I have the best Mum in the world ever, she decided she was going to buy me a Magnolia stellata when we visited Squires at the weekend. So I picked one out (which has big fuzzy flower buds on it), and potted it up on Sunday.


Only got a quick photo of it before work on Wednesday - I must get a better shot of it at the weekend. So here are some of the magnolias I have seen over the past few days:


This Magnolia x soulangeana in Acton made my long journey back from Ikea tolerable on Sunday.


This Magnolia stellata erupted last week. Mum has demanded one for her own garden, despite the designer's assertion that they get "messy".


And a larger M. stellata was in St James's Park, near the bridge.

Horticultural Heritage

Mum came to see me for the day on Saturday, and brought with her a present for me - an Amateur Gardening medallion. She and her sister had agreed that as I was the gardener in my generation in the family, I should be the one to have it. All we know is that it belonged to Grandpa, and Mum wondered if he had sent photographs into the magazine or something similar.


This is the front of the medallion - I would assume that the woman on the engraving is Ceres, the Roman goddess of growing plants. And on the back the medallion reads:

Presented by Amateur Gardening for merit in horticulture

So, all you who know far more about the history of gardening than I do (let's face it, I'm lost any time pre-Geoff Hamilton), what might this medallion have been awarded to Grandpa for? Would Amateur Gardening keep records of everyone who ever received one of these? Grandpa had an unusual surname, so if he's in there, he's probably easy to find!

I must do some digging (ho ho!). I know Mum and my aunt would be very interested to know the background.

Cheap Ferns

Here are the ferns I bought at Ikea for 38p each:


The whole lot cost me £2.28. In retrospect I should maybe have bought more (although I suspect Hubster has just spat coffee all over his computer screen as he reads this).


I think it's most likely Nephrolepis "Boston Compacta". The fronds feel just like Sideshow Bob's (touch is so underrated as an identification method). I don't know what I'm going to do with them all yet, but I certainly think I can plant up some more hanging baskets.

Start Of The Season

It was such a glorious day on Sunday! So warm - I clocked up to 18°C in the growhouse even with the flap up. I braved Ikea first thing in the morning. Apart from the sheer number of parents who thought Ikea was the perfect place to bring petulant toddlers who'd rather have been watching cartoons, it wasn't too heinous. I picked up a couple of the mini-coldframe thingies, and half a dozen ferns at 38p each. I was so tempted by the Livistonia for a fiver and more Cycas revoluta for £7.50, but I resisted.

So when I got home it was straight out in the garden. It was warm enough to sit outside in t-shirts and eat lunch, and having opened the green tomato chutney from last season for the first time, Hubster and I are thoroughly enjoying it with cheese and bread. And then a solid afternoon's work, potting up a newly-acquired Magnolia stellata, disposing of the truly dead stuff, and removing a vine weevil infestation from the Tsuga canadensis (distressed to discover that vine weevils ADORE Tsuga).


This was the first of the 10 or so I found. I put them for the birds to eat. The robins obliged.

My parents brought some lovely big sandstone lumps from their garden for me (they're having their garden totally redesigned), and I used a couple to raise up pots, and the rest as accents. They looked really good with little tea-light lanterns on top of them.


I poured myself a margarita and sat outside for a couple of hours as it got dark. I could not believe that it was still the middle of March - it's felt like April for the past few days. Fronds are almost visibly unfurling, and I am relieved to see that every single one of my deciduous conifers is budding: the Metasequoia going full steam ahead into leaf!

Greed, Lust And Probably Some Anger By Sunday Night

In today's Grauniad:

The £10 blowout
For people with tiny gardens but big ambitions, Ikea has a great solution. This mini-greenhouse will fit into the smallest backyard and allow you to grow plants from seed whatever the weather.
FRO mini-greenhouse, £10, from Ikea, 0834 355 3364, ikea.co.uk

And here is the little beauty:


There are 17 in stock in the Wembley Ikea as I type. I don't know if I'm coveting it enough to drive out there tonight after Carol Klein on BBC2, or if I can wait until Sunday morning (maternal visit tomorrow).

I don't even know where on earth I'm going to put it, but I know I want at least one!!

Mashed Bananas

How ironic. Everything that was abandoned to the elements or rather haphazardly covered with fleece is fine and dandy (except the proteas but we don't talk about them). The two Ensete "Maurelii" bananas and Cyathea australis (although there's some suggestion that it might have been C. cooperi) are mush. They were the ones I wrapped up with paper shreddings and fleece.

Squidgy, rotten and a bit stinky. Bugger. And the tree fern doesn't seem much better. I've chucked some fungicide over them all in the hope that something is alive and non-mushy in the depths of the soil.

The bananas were spares given to me by HTUK people, so I feel guilty for completely failing to look after them sufficiently well, but the tree fern hurts badly. It was a nice big one, although it didn't have a trunk.

No photos as they would be too distressing.

Good Karma

Do you remember the trials and tribulations I had back when I first started this blog, because Karma Camellia wasn't flowering, all the ones at Wisley had already flowered and even the neglected bush in my neighbour's garden was in full bloom?

And do you remember that it was 17th April before it flowered, when I had almost given up hope? Well, this was it this morning:


By the weekend, when my mum comes to visit, it'll have half a dozen of those babies open.


This is the first thing to flower in Jurassic Park all year (I think my witch hazel is dead...), and a definite sign that spring is here, but I can't help but wonder (in my capacity as chief nerd in our household) why there's this six-week difference. He's even beaten the neighbour's bush into flower.

I bought the Camellia from a garden centre in Paisley, where my in-laws live. They had a 2007-2008 winter easily as bad as the 2008-2009 winter we had in the Tropic of Isleworth. The buds were already out when I bought it at the end of January, but took two and a half months to mature and flower. This year they've appeared and flowered in about one and a half months.

Is it just that Karma has had the love and attention of Yours Truly for over a year and has rewarded me with flowering when he's goddamn supposed to? Or do camellias flourish when they get a really biting frosty winter? Was the compost I gave him better when I repotted him in the late summer? I'd just like to know what I did right over the past year so I can carry on doing it!

Ealing Tip

Tesco, in their infinite wisdom, have stopped giving green points for everything but aluminium cans at their recycling points, and Hounslow Council removed the recycling station at Homebase at Gillette Corner because of fly-tipping (thus causing fly-tipping at Tesco and at the Brentford recycling station). So Hubster and I decided to masquerade as Ealing residents (the next-door borough) and visit their local tip to dispose of our plastics, en route to the cinema.

As I was sitting in the queue waiting for a parking space, I noticed that all along the fence, the staff had planted completely random plants. I assumed that they had been chucked out by people who didn't want them, rescued by the staff and planted to try and make the place look a little less tip-like.

I was driving, so not really in a position to take lots of photographs, but I did manage to snap this one, which caught my eye:


Aloe striatula? It looks exactly like three pups I was handed by a fellow HTUK member a year ago. Amazing what people throw out. There were some purple Zantedeschia and any number of Hebe (a plant I only like in the hope that someone will discover a new species and call it H. jebe).

Garden Furniture

I accidentally bought a potting bench a couple of weeks ago. You know how it is - you go to the garden centre to get some fungicide and some fat balls, and you come out with all sorts of stuff.

On Saturday, I cajoled Hubster into helping me build the bench. This was the brief moment where I felt a little guilty for getting him to help:


But Hubster did a cracking job (and I had just cooked him sausage and egg to help him recover from the hangover he had acquired on account of being out on the razz the previous night), and neither of us got splinters or a screwdriver through the hand (an improvement on the last time I attempted DIY).


Here it is in its final spot, where I've made myself a little utility area. It means I can concentrate Jurassic Park the other side of the steps.

Grubs

As I mentioned earlier in the week, it was a glorious day for gardening on Sunday, and I was able to do a lot of spring cleaning. As I was cutting back ferns and palms I found several little green caterpillars.


Now, I have gone on the basis that, regardless of identification, most caterpillars are pests (and they certainly seem to have munched away on my Asplenium scolopendrium with their buddies the slugs). And so they were all put on top of the compost bin, where Mr and Mrs Robin were more than happy to have an extra tasty meaty treat.

Now, they're not cabbage white caterpillars, because they're black and yellow. So that was a relief. Two of them were found near the base of two of my Polystichum ferns, and the other was in one of the rolled-up Aspidistra leaves. What do you think - angle shades moth? And were they probably what chewed big holes in my Tetrapanax "Rex" before Christmas?

My solution is to train up my elite squad of attack robins, backed up by the blue tits, to remove the caterpillars for me. I'm not a big fan of insecticides, and I doubt my organic spray will do any good.

Bastard Joins Facebook

Dogs, cats and babies have all been on Facebook for ages, but I decided it was time some of my plants joined.

So I have created a page: Bastard The Cycad. I don't know whether it will be visible to anyone who isn't already on Facebook, but if you are, you can become a fan of the member of Jurassic Park with the biggest personality on the internet.

My brother has pointed out that it's probably inappropriate to say "fan", and I think "victim" is more apt. And anyone who hasn't been stabbed by Bastard is just a future victim.

I sometimes wonder if I should do more productive things with my time than creating fan pages for my plants, but where would be the fun in that?

Stripping Off

It was a glorious weekend down south. So glorious that I felt like taking all my clothes off...


... Off the plants, that is.


I know we have a bit of cold weather still heading our way, but the forecast is reasonably mild for London and anything really tender is still fleeced or dead.

Yeah, lost a few plants over the winter. I showed once and for all that I have no talent for growing proteas. I killed a Banksia spinulosa over the summer, and the Leucospermum "Scarlet Ribbons" croaked too. The kill list for the winter includes Protea neriifolia and Dryandra formosa, and sadly I suspect Leucadendron "Safari Sunset". Protea cynaroides is hanging on with odd orange-coloured leaves, and Grevillea juniperina and Banksia ericifolia look like they've spent the whole winter at Botany Bay.

I think there will be some fern casualties, but as most of them are deciduous I need to wait a couple of months before consigning them to the compost heap.

But I'm happy - Blechnum tabulare, despite looking a bit brown round the edges, has done really well. That was really my top purchase of 2008, especially when I look back at how tiny it was the day I bought it.


The fleece is close to hand in case we do get an absolute stonker of a frost forecast, and there's no way any of the Ensete "Maurelii" are being unwrapped until Easter!

Have any of you had a sneaky peek under the fleece? Or have you thrown all caution to the wind like I have and exposed the plants to the elements at least a month earlier than a sensible person should?

St David's Day Daffs

I was fortunate enough to have a Welsh grandmother, and so St David's Day, 1st March each year, was always a time of daffodils. St David is the patron saint of Wales, and the daffodil is the national flower. I'm not fortunate enough to have ever learned any Welsh, but The Inelegant Gardener has obliged with an example of the language.

I shall just shove up a few photos of daffodils instead.


These are all in Green Park at the moment, near the tube station.


Sadly, cut daffodils in the house always make me sniffle, so since I moved out of my parents' house I haven't had any.

One Welsh flower that definitely won't make me sniffle is Ospreys and Welsh rugby player James Hook:


What can I say - I like the tall, blue-eyed, protruding brow-ridge look. Just ask Hubster. And I think if Grannie and her sister Aunty Bee Bee were still alive, they'd like James Hook too.