The Hydrangea paniculata 'Limelight' that I cut down hard in March has responded magnificently. Any doubts I had about whether it was indeed 'Limelight' were quashed the moment the flowers opened fully in a beautiful, vivid shade of lime green. And what flowers. The domed panicles are huge, much larger than in the last couple of years and pre-pruning. Not all hydrangeas flower on the current year's growth, and the spring chop only works for those that do, but for 'Limelight', and I presume the other paniculatas, fairly hard spring pruning seems the way ahead. The flowers fade to white after a few days, so I was not entirely mad to wonder whether I had the real article. Looking at it now, you wouldn't know.
The other success is with my B&Q bargain cycad. It lives in the conservatory, and I've had it for ages. One year they had a great stock of cycads, nice big ones, which I eyed covetously, but was reluctant to pay whatever large sum it was that B&Q were asking for them. Suddenly the last few were reduced. There was nothing at all wrong with them, it was simply that the management had decided that that was enough cycads, Ed. I brought my bargain home in triumph, and for several years it lived happily in the dimmest corner of the conservatory, and threw out two or three new rows of leaves. I preened myself about that, having read that they were not the easiest plants to keep, and could easily stop growing.
Pride cometh before a fall, and self-congratulation in gardening is generally fatal. I reorganised the conservatory at some point, and moved the cycad to the sunnier side of the room. It never thrived, and the ends of each leathery leaf on its long fronds went brown. I didn't seem to be able to get the watering regime right, and began to wonder if it disliked that much light, though given they grow outdoors in warmer areas that seemed unlikely. Even so, I moved it back to the corner where it used to be happy, trimmed off the brown ends, which gave the leaves a ragged appearance, and cut off the outer rings of leaves as they yellowed and died, until the cycad was down to only one circle of foliage perched on top of its scaly, pineapple-like brown body. Last year it sent up a single leaf, which promptly went brown at the ends.
I thought the cycad was doomed, consoling myself with the fact that I'd read they were difficult to grow. I turfed it out of its pot when I was tidying the conservatory a few weeks ago, intending to consign it to the bonfire. The compost was filled with dead roots, but no signs of vine weevil. I cleared away the old compost and the roots, intending to learn what I could from its demise, and found a few white, fat, healthy roots, only a few centimetres long, emerging from the chunky central core.
I repotted the cycad in a pot barely large enough to hold the base of the trunk, one which looked ridiculously small underneath the remaining single ring of tattered leaves, and left it in what used to be its favourite corner. I only watered it when the compost looked dry. As the weeks passed I thought there was a sort of incipient tuft on top of the body, and probed gently with my fingertips for any hint of green. The incipient tuft developed into a tiny topknot a couple of centimetres tall. When I went down to water the conservatory today, the tuft had shot up and is fully fifteen centimetres high, the leaves still held tightly together in a vertical column, each with serrated edges where the leaflets will develop, like the snouts of tiny alligators stuck in the air.
I think that's cracked it. Now it has come back into growth, with any luck it will continue. At some point I must have over-watered it so that most of its root system rotted, and after that it was stuck sitting in more compost than it could use, and probably over-wet at times. What I must do now is pot it on very cautiously, maybe up one pot size next spring. And not move it around the conservatory.
In the garden I am pruning the box hedge, quite hard. By tradition I should have done that on Derby Day, and it has been on my list of things to do since then. I just haven't had time to do it.
Addendum 'Requiem for the Croppies' is a cracking poem, which I forgot about yesterday. That's one more in the bag for Heaney.
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