I have too many plants in the greenhouse. Some I bought, some I grew. Too many of them need planting out or potting on. I'm potting and planting as fast as I can, but that's not fast enough. In the meantime I'm running out of places to stand the ones I do pot on.
Many of them are intended for particular spots, and the trouble is that their intended destinations are already occupied, either by weeds or by more than I want of some other plant. Today and yesterday I was engaged in a complicated two stage manoeuvre, moving a dwarf iris with blue flowers from the turning circle to the long flowerbed, so that I can plant out a small grove of seed raised Dierama mossii. The Dierama were sitting on the top layer of one of the aluminium racks in the greenhouse until I moved them outside in the spring so that I could use the space on the rack for more recent seedlings, then I had to move them in again because they were getting too wet in their pots outside, and there was nowhere to put them except the floor, so I have to be careful not to step on them. The dwarf iris are heavily infested by a grass with a creeping rootstock, one reason why they have to be lifted, and the gap in the long bed I'm using them to fill had grown a lively crop of weeds which had to be removed, so the whole process is taking a while. To make more space for the Dierama I'll reduce the size of a patch of low growing Artemisia, which has expanded to cover an area of the turning circle about twice the size of my kitchen table, or more Artemisia than anyone could reasonably want. I'm going to have to buy a bulk bag of gravel to mulch the areas where the iris and Artemisia were and spread that out. All in all it will come to well over a day's work, at the end of which I'll have space to plant out eight or ten of the pots languishing in the greenhouse.
I tried giving a Dierama and a variegated pelargonium to a friend who is a keen and able gardener, but as she gave me a Jacaranda seedling in return it's only a net reduction of one pot, and the Jacaranda will need potting on into quite a large pot in time, and to be overwintered under frost free glass. If we lived on a road I could try selling the spares at the front gate. I ought really to market the more unusual ones on e-Bay, but haven't got round to it yet. When I think of the hassle of packaging live plants, and the cost of postage, it all seems like hard work. I gave the boss a spare Puya venusta, a tender rosette forming plant with evil inward pointing spines designed to trap sheep. It lives in a pot outside the office door in the summer, and comes into the office for the winter, and the gardener was made to pot it on which can't have been a pleasant experience, so it is looking bigger and better than my remaining Puya. However it did not seem to occur to the boss to ask if I had any more of those at home, and offer to buy them for stock in the plant centre.
Sometimes it's difficult to resist propagating. Those little shoots that some Hemerocallis form on their flower stems, for example. If you carefully pull them away, or cut them off with a small section of stem, and pot them up, they usually root. Who can resist free Hemerocallis? The manager gave me a basal piece that a customer had broken off a chrysanthemum, which already had the beginnings of roots. You would need a heart of stone not to put it in compost and give it some water. I now have a free chrysanthemum, though I can't remember what colour it is. I've got a bowl of seed from Anemone pavonina sitting on the hall table, picked from my own plant in the gravel. This year has not been great seed collecting weather, with the rain, and the last time I sowed A. pavonina seed it went mouldy, but I'd love to have more of them and know exactly where they'd go, in the gravel with the others.
While I have too many plants unplanted I should stop buying any more, and I partly do, but if something turns up that I know is rarely available and that I want for the garden, it seems foolish to let it pass by. I bought an Erythrina christa-galli on that basis recently, which has gone in at the base of a west facing wall. It was only about the third time we've had it in stock in nine years. We only had Paeonia rockii the once, so I'm very glad I snapped that up when I saw it.
I suppose I will just have to keep planting and potting as fast as I can, or become more ruthless and creative in my methods, and when invited out to supper start turning up at people's houses with a sheep-eating tender bromeliad from Latin America as a hostess present, instead of a bunch of flowers.
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