Thursday 16 June 2011

some amazing plant recoveries (and one not)

Looking out of the bathroom window this morning I saw a robin and a great tit already standing on the empty bird table, so refilled it as soon as I'd had my shower and got dressed.  Despite the rain of recent days (11mm in the past 24 hours) there must still be a shortage of natural food, as I don't normally need to feed the birds in June.

The view of the bird table from my desk is partially obscured by one of the potted camellias which stand in a row outside the study window.  Next time I'm out there I must budge the pots along to give me a clear line of sight.  I've been feeding the camellias in containers with a dilute liquid ericaceous feed, about one in every three times I water them (slightly dictated by when I can be bothered to carry the watering can around to the back of the house instead of using the hose) and they have been opening new leaves for a while now, and starting to look more respectable.  They were very dishevelled and sad at the end of winter, with sparse discoloured leaves and some dead twigs.  I realised quite how bad they had got when I compared them to the camellias growing in the ground, which apart from a couple of branches broken down by the weight of the snow were looking green and lush, and much more densely clothed with leaves.  Among the container grown plants the smaller and younger specimens suffered more, and I lost one, 'J.C. Williams', a good early pale pink which was one of the first williamsii hybrids and named after one of the Williams family of Caerhayes in Cornwall.

The plants in the ground have not always been so happy.  C. x williamsii 'Jury's Yellow' went into the bank between the house and the wood in April 2003.  It was a well-grown young specimen just ready to plant out, root system nicely filling its pot without being pot-bound.  The soil on the slope where it's planted is not great, being strange structureless stuff dumped there by builders in the 1970s, and the slope made it difficult to water the camellia, though I did try.  Twigs kept dying back and I kept trimming them off and hoping, until the bush was reduced to no more than half of its original size.  Then, at last, it established itself and began to grow.  It is now a shining, healthy plant fully 1.5m wide and tall.  I hope that the smallest of the remaining potted camellias is going to pull off the same trick.  'Donation' gave up on half of its top growth last winter, but in the past couple of weeks has started opening new leaves, and I think the corner has been turned.  It is hard on them standing outside all winter, and I should bring them in, or at least the smaller ones.  The trouble is that there is nowhere to put them.  Over-cramming the conservatory with pots just leads to everything being neglected, as I can't see what I'm doing with the watering.  (To a gardener in the south west of England the pace of growth of my Essex camellias must seem painfully slow.  It is.  That's what happens if you grow camellias on sand in an area with just over 500mm average annual rainfall.  But they are perfectly healthy.  Camellias are much more satisfactory than rhododendrons for dry sites).

The olive in the front garden is shooting from the main trunk, and some of the branches.  I thought it was still alive.  They do say you should wait until June before writing plants off.  A third harsh winter will be too much for it, I fear, but that might well not happen.  I'll give it a while longer, to see more clearly which of the branches still have life in them, and then trim out the dead wood.

The plum 'Marjories' Seedling', that I had doubts about at the time of planting, never came to anything good.  It was watered, and threw a weak shoot from very low down, just above the graft.  I could complain to the grower, but then I would be embroiled in an argument about whether or not I had watered it enough, given the weather we've had.  I think I'll try again in the autumn with another supplier, and quietly not use the first lot again or recommend them to people.  It is the second time I have had a failure with one of their plums.  Odd, because their cherries have been fine.  Maybe plums are difficult.  Two is not a statistically valid sample, but I'm sure that 'Marjorie's Seedling' wasn't right when they sent it to me.  Pity, because the grower has a long and interesting list, but life is too short to spend it on arguments with mail order suppliers of bare-rooted fruit.

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