Saturday 5 April 2014

out with the old, in with the new

I have dug out the Hemerocallis which suffered from the untreatable midge problem so that they never flowered.  The pests are Hemerocallis specialists, so far as I know, and it's a nice question how they got into the garden, when we are several hundred yards from any other gardens.  They lay their eggs inside the flower buds, which become fat and distorted, and either fail to open, or produce ugly, deformed flowers.  If you break one open you will find it full of horrid, wriggling, pale coloured maggots.  There is no effective spray available, or at least not to amateur gardeners, and anyway I don't like applying pesticides wholesale.

The pests persist in the soil from year to year, presumably as pupae, and friends have told me of people who successfully broke the cycle by removing every flower bud for a season, so that the mites had nowhere to lay their eggs when they hatched out, and so there was no follow-on generation.  I considered this plan, but rejected it.  The pest reached the garden once, so it could do so again.  The easiest solution seems to be to grow only the later flowering varieties, which are apparently less affected.  I have no idea why the pest doesn't take full advantage of the growing season, but if it doesn't, it doesn't.

It felt very wasteful digging up the clumps, which had got quite large, and throwing the roots into a bag to go to the tip, when there was propagation material enough to make dozens of plants, but non-flowering Hemerocallis are no use to anybody.  Gardeners, like novelists, need a sliver of ice at their hearts, and to have an eye for the overall garden picture, which means being willing to get rid of plants that are not contributing.  That is a tough call.  Even though you paid money for a plant, or went to great lengths to obtain it, or desperately love it when you see it growing well somewhere else with different conditions to your garden, if with you it is a sorry, ugly, non-performing consumer of space then you are making your garden less than it could be if you allow it to remain. Nature and artifice, red in tooth and claw.

I had already bought an Alstromeria to go into one of the spaces, once I'd dug the Hemerocallis out. The flowers are an agreeable mixture of pinky-brown and yellow, called 'Rhubarb and Custard', and I picked it up last year when I saw it flowering in a one litre pot.  I moved it on into three litres, and it spent a happy few months in the greenhouse, making a massive rootball in its new pot.  I hope it will be equally vigorous let loose in the light soil of the border.  The hybrid Alstromeria seem to like our free drainage, though they must have full light, and I have lost one as the surrounding shrubs have grown, changing the nature of that border from open ground to woodland edge.  I have not done nearly so well with the species A. psitticina, which seems far less vigorous.  That's a pity, as I like its weedily exotic red and green flowers.

I was obliged to buy a new border spade the other day, as I managed to break the handle of my old one.  I bought a new handle for the broken one as well, in the hopes that the Systems Administrator might fit it, but needed something for immediate use.  The new one has a stainless steel blade that makes light work of slicing through Hemerocallis roots, and is altogether so much nicer to use than my old one that I realise I should have gone stainless ages ago.  It would still be worth fitting the new handle to the other spade, though, to have a spare and for situations in which I would rather not use my best stainless steel one.

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