setting out the pots

I spent a happy day moving the pots of geraniums from their winter quarters in the greenhouse to the Italian garden in front of the house.  These are geraniums in the pelargonium sense of the word, but not even the boss insists on calling them pelargoniums.  Their ancestors came from South Africa, and by March they were looking unutterably miserable after an Essex winter in a frost-free (but no more) greenhouse.  The recent hot weather has made them believe they are in heaven, and they are leafing up and sending out new shoots with the air of plants whose time has finally come.  I like keeping them from year to year, even though it is nip and tuck in the winter, because it saves the time and expense of buying fresh plants and compost each spring, and the labour of planting them up, and because it gives a pleasant sense of stewardship and continuity.

Some were bought at plant stalls, or received as presents from friends and relations and never came with names, while I've kept others going by taking cuttings and have managed to lose their labels, so I don't know what half of them are.  The scented leaf varieties seem to cope quite well with the low winter temperatures, while some other sorts bought for their relatively glamorous flowers from a specialist geranium grower did not make it through the two long, cold winters.  Some ivy leaf specimens bought at work look particularly stressed and dreadful in the winter, but leaf up vigorously in the spring.  If they can't cope with the conditions they go on the compost heap, and by a process of natural selection I'm ending up with a selection of those that can survive the winter damp and chill.

Some of the Geranium maderense grown from seed filched from plants by the V&A courtyard cafe are flowering this year.  This species normally dies after flowering, and flowers when it has built up the strength and inclination to do so.  I gave one of my young plants to a friend, and it flowered for her in the first year, so this spring I've been dosing mine occasionally with liquid tomato feed, which is what the specialist geranium nursery recommended in their growing instructions.  This species is not the easiest to keep going through the winter, being picky about the watering regime.  They seems to want to be dry (as do all geraniums in a UK winter) but die if allowed to get too dry, quite suddenly.  Cold nights distress them, sending the leaves wizened and bronzed, and they are more susceptible to aphid attack than the usual sorts of geranium.

I also have a few dwarf pomegranates, grown from seed, which have recently leafed up nicely, having spent the winter as pots of worrying little dried twigs.  They flowered last year, but not lavishly, and I have been including them in the tomato food regime.  Pots of the almost hardy, silver leafed Senecio, grown on from a tray of young plants bought at a garden gate, have mostly survived the winter, and are bushing out.  A couple shrivelled and died when we had a cold spell, but I couldn't work out whether that was the drop in temperature, or if I'd been too stingy with the watering in my attempts to avoid rot.

There are several pots of Agapanthus, the number tending to grow over time as I buy odd extra plants I like the look of.  My target this year is 'Queen Mum', which has large flowers of violet shading to white.  I admired them last year at work, but we only had a few huge plants at over thirty quid a pop, while this year we have more plants at a more sensible size and price.  Some of the older specimens could do with repotting, and I have made a basic error and planted them in pots that are narrower at the top than further down, with attractive pie crust edges and rope tops.  This is a shame, because the only way I'm going to get the plants out for repotting is to smash the pots.

There's a mauve flowered, striped leaf form of Tuhlbaghia, an allium relative whose affinity is betrayed by the onion smell of its leaves.  It flowers for a very long time once it starts, and is a better value plant than the green leafed and white flowered sort, which doesn't seem to bloom as prolifically, or for as long.  There's a pink flowered Crinum, which flowered a couple of times last year, and another Crinum that is supposed to be white, but I haven't been able to verify that because it has never flowered with me.  It is a weaker grower than the other, so maybe it is the white form, as white flowered variants are sometimes less vigorous than their stronger coloured companions.

There is a red and a white Clianthus, or lobster plant, both raised from seed and flowering a little but slightly beset by snails and the cold nights dragging on so late, and an Albizia, also raised from seed, which isn't growing as vigorously as I feel it ought to be, having seen the ones at work.  There's a marguerite with single pale yellow flowers, and I've bought a double pale yellow to expand the range.  The Argyranthemum, and a B&Q box of blue nemesias I've just got to go in the ancestral Heals pot, are the only bedding plants I've bought this year, everything else being a tender perennial or shrub that scraped through winter in the greenhouse.  B&Q are doing a BOGOF on plants this weekend, so I got a box of red and green flowered mimulus for free when I bought the nemesias.  I'm not exactly sure where I'll use them, but it seemed a shame to pass up free plants.