I have a nasty suspicion that I am not going to be able to fit all the potted dahlias and the geraniums and tender bulbs in the Italian garden back in the greenhouse, when the weather gets cooler and I need to move them in. Since we are already into the fourth week of September that day is going to come sooner rather than later. The problem is that after unpacking the greenhouse for the summer and distributing its contents around the garden, I moved on a lot of plants I'd propagated previously into larger pots.
A set of Puya venusta which had been languishing in two litre pots for ages are now sitting resplendently in five litres, though not looking nearly as good as the one I gave to the boss a couple of years back, who got the young gardener to repot his in a timely fashion (Puya have extremely sharp reverse pointing spines up the edges of their strap shaped leaves, designed to trap sheep, so that the plant can feed on the rotting carcass, so I don't suppose the young gardener enjoyed that part of his day particularly). The problem is that they now take up a good quarter of the greenhouse staging on one side.
A number of other things had been stuck in too-small pots for too long, ranging from one litre down to divided trays, and these were also moved up by an appropriate margin. The trouble is, between them they now occupy all of the bench and the narrow shelf above the bench, and most of the aluminium staging, and a good proportion of the floor, while I still have to put the dahlias, geraniums, agapanthus, pineapple lilies, dwarf pomegranates, tulbaghias and the rest somewhere. Two bulb orders are due to arrive any day now, and while I'll start off the big pots of tulips outside, I'm not risking it with some of the smaller stuff, so they'll need space under cover. And then next February I want to sow a decent quantity of seeds, after taking a semi-break for a couple of years. It is a mathematical impossibility for it all to fit in.
Part of the solution is to plant as much as possible into the garden. Anything that's rooted fully into its compost and ready to go, unless it is particularly tender. I think it would be sensible to leave my gift of a rather battered Buddleia fallowiana var. alba safely under cover until the spring. But there was no reason why some of the Physalis alkekengi should not go out, other than the fine crop of weeds growing in the space around the feet of a Rosa glauca where I intended to put them. And so it came to be that my first most urgent task after returning from holiday was to weed a space in the middle of the island bed. Physalis is also known as Chinese lantern plant, due to its inflated orange-red seed cases, which I think will look cheerful with the red hips of the rose, and the blue flowers of a hibiscus nearby. It has rather coarse leaves, and running roots which I hope will do battle with the herbaceous Coronilla varia, whose underground expansionist tendencies are starting to become faintly alarming.
As I weeded I found a few lupin seedlings, which I potted up carefully with a few grains of miccorhizal fungus while hoping for the best. The best is that they will prove to be offspring of the beautiful and drought resistant Lupinus albifrons, and not just yellow tree lupins. Both have grown in that bed in the past, the L. albifrons raised from seed supplied by the excellent Chiltern Seeds. It is a lovely thing, a native of California with a lax habit, a silvery cast to its foliage, and blue flowers. When I first planted it out I totally failed to grasp how large it was going to get, and set my plants far too close to the edge of the bed so that they grew out over the lawn to a ridiculous degree. I like a bit of informality and spilling over, but the lupins were just wrong. In cavalier fashion I dug the plants out, after saving some seed, which I then failed to get around to sowing. In the meantime Chiltern dropped the species from their list, and I found I'd failed to keep a record of the name.
I contacted Chiltern, describing the plant and asking whether they could tell me what it might be given I got the seed from them, and after a few days received a very detailed and helpful reply from someone there, telling me not merely the name, but the bad news that she'd checked who sold it, and not only did they no longer stock the seeds, but the plant itself was not currently in commerce in the UK. She added that it sounded such a good species that maybe they should reintroduce it to their catalogue. I've said it before, Chiltern Seeds are a first class company.
The good news is that I have one solitary self-sown plant, which appeared last year, in a rather overgrown patch of the island bed. When it first grew I assumed it was another yellow tree lupin, that was not growing very tall due to the competition, until a flower opened blue. I was all set to harvest seed, when the lupins in that bed were hit by an extremely bad aphid infestation and the plant not only failed to set seed but lost most of its leaves. I thought it was a goner, but the stunted remains that were all that was left after I'd cut out the dead wood have sprouted anew. I found my packet of saved seed as well when tidying up, and will sow them in February in case one or two are still viable after three years in a brown envelope. With one plant growing in the ground, four wilting potted-up seedlings that might or might not be the real thing, and a packet of geriatric seed, Lupinus albifrons is clawing its way back from extinction in north east Essex.
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