The Chinese Curse

There is a curse:

May you live in interesting times
May you come to the attention of those in authority
May you find what you are looking for

And at the moment I'm well and truly at the mercy of the first of the three clauses. So I have beaten a retreat to my parents' house in the grim and frozen north for the long weekend. My mother has assured me that her garden needs weeding, and since I have very few weed problems with my own garden, I'm happy to oblige, and brought all my gardening clothes with me.

While this is some much-needed R&R, it does mean that I'm going to miss going to Victoria's open garden. I met Victoria for the first time at the Syon Rare Plant Fair back in April, and she is truly lovely, and one day I will have a chance to really talk to her for a long time. I feel awful for not being able to go and support her, so perhaps if any of you are around in London tomorrow, you might go to see the garden and say a big hello from me?

Today I went for a walk at Newstead Abbey with the ancestors. Some posts maybe coming up on the basis of that.

You Have To Propagate To Accumulate

I think I'll be buying a new greenhouse soon, as things are really taking off. Hell, before I buy a new greenhouse I need to buy new seed trays! The top shelf of the growhouse is full:


These are Hubster's cuttings - I helped him to learn how to take cuttings of rosemary, lavender, sage and marjoram, and I'm religiously spraying them each morning as Jekka McVicar says to! We ate our way through so many Tesco Value strawberry yogurts, and they've made brilliant pots for the cuttings. The cuttings are all doing really well and putting out new growth - I've never been that great at propagation from cuttings, so it's quite a kick for me to see this even though they're not my plants.

I was a bit snobbish with my own seedlings though - I have some Coffea arabica, and I used "proper" pots for them!


I have plants on two of the other shelves, and that's before I sow all the seeds I got in the JungleSeeds sale (all four Magnolia and all two Bauhinia species they sell). Maybe I'll just be storing them until the spring...

Wordless Wednesday: Garden Ornament Or Sex Toy?

Chartreuse

What my Wollemia nobilis lacked the first half of the summer, it is making up for in spades:


I've been using seaweed and Palmbooster on pretty much every plant, the Wollemia included.


Has anyone used Jurassic Plant Food before? I'm wondering if it might be a worthwhile investment to make sure Matildus gets his act together on time next year.

What's The Use?

Because you can take a half-dead Zamia furfuracea with half a frond surviving and nurture it into rising from the grave:


And into flushing nicely:


It will stay in the "ICU" part of Jurassic Park until the fronds have all fully opened. I don't know if it will do the Cycas wibble if it gets moved while flushing, but why risk it on such a gorgeous cycad?

(That's rainwater stained by some compost in the bottle by the way. It occurred to me while posting this that a bottle of yellow liquid looks well dodgy...)

I Saw This And Thought Of Us

I've been introduced to the awesome Garfield Minus Garfield cartoons recently. Many of the strips are pure genius, and this one is no exception:


How many of us have said that to one of our plants? Hell, this one even looks like Sideshow Bob!

Supersecretsquirrel Project Revealed

A week ago I alluded to a "supersecretsquirrel" project. I bet you'd like to know what I was up to!


I was starting to run out of space in Jurassic Park, so decided to start on some vertical planting. Hubster did all the drilling, and I sorted the pots out. I also got some matching trellis to make a fence separating the garden from the gas meters:


I had some of my gardening forum buddies round for a barbecue last Saturday night, and it was such a confidence boost to have them admire the garden (theirs are all much bigger than mine, everything is planted out, and they've been doing it for longer than I have). Seeing a garden through another's eyes is great for the creative juices and really helped me appreciate the beauty of my own little patch.


And looking at it in this light, if there was just a nice big hedge or fence shielding those awful gas meters, to me it looks like one of those "featured gardens" they have in the magazines each month.

Wordless Wednesday: Encephalartos woodii

Forty Years?!

I've just watched a report on the BBC News that there is up to a 40-year wait for an allotment in one borough of London, Camden. We joined the waiting list in Hounslow a month or two ago, but even in our borough the waiting list is eight years long. In an optimistic mood I fantasise that by 2017 we'll have been able to buy a house with enough of a garden to have a full Jurassic Park and a vegetable patch.

So it's just as well in the meantime that we've got this:


It's a little vegetable patch at Hubster's Quaker Meeting House. What an opportunity! The gardener has offered us a fairly square deep patch which will be ideal for Hubster to grow some medicinal herbs (bloody James Wong), and it has some teasels and evening primrose already in residence. There are a couple of thinner plots, and I have great plans. I did like having my own potatoes. It was just so much effort doing them in containers so I gave it a break this year.

Here's a quick plan of the site:


Hubster was drinking his coffee and contemplating the "fruit" bed. Behind him is his big herb bed, and it continues right along to where the nursery that uses the faciities has a little patch.

There's another plot the size of the "fruit" bed which has loads of Jerusalem artichokes already on there. If I can figure out what to do with them, I'll add them to my veggie repertoire!

What have I let myself in for?

Lizards Tails

One of my best recent purchases has been Saururus cernuus, a hardy marginal aquatic plant, colloquially known as "lizards tails" and almost unheard of over this side of the Atlantic:


It's been growing well in my little pond, but has yet to produce flowers. A few weeks ago I went back to Crews Hill to see if there were any more plants as some of my friends had expressed an interest in buying one. There weren't any for sale, but they did have a nice big one in their water plant display:


And even better - it was in flower!


Can you see why they're called lizards tails? They look a little like Buddleia inflorescences, so hopefully the bees and butterflies will take a shine to one of the few flowers in Jurassic Park when they arrive.

Off to Kew Gardens now - the group visit was postponed so the cycads should definitely be back in place by today.

A Teaser

Readers who also follow me on Twitter will know I've been awaiting the arrival of a piece of vital kit for a "supersecretsquirrel" project. It all arrived earlier in the week, and after a lot of grunting, sweating and swearing (mostly on Hubster's part since I'm not allowed access to the power tools after last time) it's finished.

Here's a sneak preview of it:


The colour is "Barleywood" by Cuprinol, if you're interested.

Wordless Wednesday: Unheard-Of Landscape Shot Of Metasequoia

Intensive Care Unit

This is all that remains of Selaginella martensii. After posting about it last week I had lots of good advice, and went with the repotting option.


I took off the wilted, dead, grey bits (so most of the plant then). This tiny stub now knows it's on borrowed time, and it's been relegated to the greenhouse to see if it will man up.

Colour In The Garden

It's a source of great amusement to my neighbours that I don't have flowers in my garden, and I'm sure a garden of ferns, cycads and conifers sounds very dull and monotonous (the tone being green). So I went round today and took some photos of the vivid colours in Jurassic Park.

Red:


Yellow:


White:


Blue:


Grey:


Purple:


And every imaginable shade of green all in one plant: