Bedtime

Today was a beautiful and icy cold day with not much wind. A perfect day for finally fleecing up the less hardy (or just expensive) plants. So here we are:


Poor old Bastard the Cycad has been trussed up and fleeced (he looked ghastly after last winter, so I'm trying to minimise the damage). The Phoenix canariensis is also fleeced (my least favourite job of all).


Dicksonia antarctica and Washingtonia robusta are looking cosy too.


And Brahea armata, Bastard II, Cyathea cooperi, Blechnum tabulare, Tetrapanax "Rex" and Wollemi nobilis complete the set. These are all drawstring fleece covers from Wilkinsons, and they're so much easier than getting rolls of fleece instead.

I'm probably being overprotective this year, but after last year's carnage I'm not particularly inclined to take the risk! It's looking a bit miserable now, but I console myself with the fact that the conifers really come into their own about this time of year, and it's probably the only point where they're really visible in all their glory.

And speaking of glory, here's the prize bloom in my garden, Hubsterus buttocksi, emptying the fountain.


Brightens up one's day no end, doesn't it?

Babies At Kew

A visit to Kew Gardens beckoned last Saturday. I always love the glasshouses: the Temperate House for the unusual conifers and the Princess Of Wales Conservatory for the incredible fern sections, but it's the Palm House which was most exciting. My favourite cycad of all time, Encephalartos horridus, the ferocious blue cycad (the reasons for this should be obvious), was in fine form:


But wait, what's this I see?


It's a pup on the E. horridus!!

In fact, we counted four of them:


I would LOVE it if these were ever commercially available, but I think there is a greater chance of an asteroid destroying Earth than of me getting a CITES-protected cycad. So I had to make do with photos, and a bit of a feel:


At this stage, the pups were still really soft - even the ends didn't have sharp spikes on them. I suspect this was how dinosaurs ate similar specimens. I don't think, if I was a dinosaur, that I'd have attempted to eat them otherwise!

Indoor Gardening

It is November, and as a result far too minging to spend too much time outside in the garden. Fortunate, then, that it has been mild enough that I haven't needed to fleece up any plants yet (I'm not looking forward to that task!).

So today I dealt with the indoor component of Jurassic Park. Firstly, disposing of the pathetic excuse for a rubber plant I had rotting in the corner of the living room...


Compare this with what it looked like eleven months ago. I thought these chaps were meant to be so tough one could, in theory, abandon them in the corner of a room and barely water them for six months and they would still thrive.

Then the Araucaria heterophylla and Nephrolepis exaltata needed bigger pots, and the fountain needed cleaning and refilling.


They've now joined the Zamia furfuracea, Dioon edule and Asplenium nidus. And over on the right hand side of the picture is Caryota mitis, absolutely thriving.

And now my nose is all bunged up from the dusting (a sign that I should never do any cleaning if I can help it). Meh.

Family Jewels

At the Squires Garden Centre in Twickenham (home of some of the best gingerbread men outside of Market Drayton), there is a large Wollemia nobilis. And it's got its 'nads out at the moment!


This one is a male - rather appropriately, the male cones are long and thin, and the female cones are rounder. And it's not yet ripe - compare with the male cone I saw at Syon Park back in April:


I am wondering, given that I haven't seen a female cone yet, whether the vast majority of Wollemi pines in cultivation are male. If so, where are all the girlies? I would have thought it was important to have as many female plants as possible for propagation - are the female plants being kept back in the nurseries for this very purpose?

Look What I Made!

A few weeks ago, my parents dispatched me back home with a dozen large paving slabs for Jurassic Park. On Friday I decided I would finally do something with it, by making myself a patio.


Now, living in rented accommodation and all, and with only a patch of ground in the communal garden, I couldn't really do a proper paving job, so it was down to a few bags of sharp sand and a heavy Hubster to jump up and down.


I have some wobbly slabs, but they're much more stable to put the table and chairs on than the gravel was. And weirdly enough it now seems that there's more space - I haven't removed any plants but there's more room to get around the table and chairs and even a bit of space for more plants. How on earth did that happen?


After a pretty decent summer in Jurassic Park where all I needed to do was to relax and enjoy being in the garden, the jobs have picked up a bit. The Metasequoia is starting to change colour (and my coffee tree and tulip tree are already naked and twig-like), and you can see I have a new Magnolia grandiflora to plant up!


It's difficult not to start feeling some degree of melancholy (not least because October ended with sunshine, light winds and mild temperatures, giving way to a squally November that does not inspire the act of gardening) - some of my ferns are starting to die back already, my deciduous trees will soon be nothing but twigs, and I am already fighting a losing battle against maple leaves. So I will be looking for ways to brighten up the garden over the winter, to encourage me and Hubster to sit out, perhaps lit by torches and fairy lights, with large steaming mugs of hot chocolate...