More about the conservatory, and the things that did not do so well, or went downhill after a while. My Correa, or Australian fuchsia, falls into the latter category. Correa are evergreen shrubs with small leaves about the size of a thumbnail, which carry tubular flowers in mellow shades of yellow, red, green, or some peachy combination thereof. The flowers, apart from the fact that they are long and thin, do not look particularly like those of a fuchsia, but are pretty, and are borne abundantly for quite a long time in the winter months. The plant betrays its southern hemisphere origins by its slight tenderness, so if you have a frost free conservatory it will appreciate the shelter. They are apt to become straggly with age, but don't mind having their long growths shortened back. One of my colleagues who was far more ruthless than I was used to do this regularly to the Correa in the plant centre. They survived, and customers bought them.
Now to the bad news, which comes in two parts. One is that the old flowers tend to hang on the plant as they fade, so if you want your conservatory specimen to look pristine and nice you will have to pick the old petals off. It isn't an unpleasant task, but takes time, which you may not have, or may not wish to use it grooming your Australian fuchsia. The other drawback is that they tend to attract sap sucking insects, whose presence is betrayed by a light dusting of sooty mould on the little leaves, making them look slightly shabby. Aphids and other sap suckers are very rarely a problem outside in our garden, thanks to the thriving population of small birds (though even they would not eat the lupin aphids we were hit by last year, which are huge and truly revolting). Under glass is another matter. I would occasionally spray the Correa with insecticide, but I didn't like doing it and it was a nuisance.
At some point last year I took a hard look at the Correa, and decided that it was no longer a thing of beauty or a joy forever. Rather than binning it, which can be the right thing to do, I pruned it extremely hard, thus getting rid of the straggliness and most of the sooty mould in one fell swoop. It was very slow to respond, so much so that I thought at various times that I should simply have chucked it out, but it is now making new growth, which is so far aphid and sap-sucker free. I have just given it a dusting of fish, blood and bone to encourage it on its way.
Next to it is a shrub which has not gone badly wrong yet, but has started to go visibly downhill. It is called Eriobotrya 'Coppertone', and was a present from the Systems Administrator, bought at my request and great expense to the management, because it came already trained as a standard with a fine, fat trunk. The origins of 'Coppertone' are mysterious according to Hillier's dictionary, but it may be a hybrid between a loquat, Eriobotrya japonica, and a Photinia. 'Coppertone' is an evergreen, with leaves quite like photinia, including the trick of producing new foliage in a lovely shade of bronze. The flowers, which have just finished, are pink, held in clusters, and very sweetly scented. It is one of those shrubs which would probably survive outside in a sheltered position, if the winters were not too bad, but is very happy with some additional protection, and of course the smell of the flowers in a confined space is magnified.
I moved my new standard on into a larger pot, and it responded by making new growth, flowering magnificently, and generally looking radiantly happy with life. This spring it has not been so good. The old leaves are showing some black spots, which I take to be a sign of stress (Photinia will do the same thing) and it is slow to make new leaves or extension growth. I saw the stock at work, which had not sold immediately and so stayed in their original, smaller pots for a while, do exactly the same thing, a sign of getting pot-bound. And here's the rub. I can't move mine into an even bigger pot. I don't think I could buy one, and it would be too heavy to move if I did. In theory I should take it out of its existing pot, scrape off some of the old compost, perhaps trim some of the roots, and repot it into the old pot with a surrounding layer of fresh compost which it could explore with new roots. I might yet have to co-opt the SA to heave it out of its pot and do that: I'm sure I couldn't get it out by myself. In the meantime I have given it a dose of fish, blood and bone, washed down with liquid seaweed solution.
The sad truth is that many shrubs don't like being in pots long term. This was confirmed to me by the owner of the last garden I visited, who used standards in pots, but admitted that despite best efforts top-dressing and repotting, it was an uphill struggle in the long term. One of her borders housed a pair of spectacularly healthy standard shrubby honeysuckles, that had been planted into the ground because they looked so sad in their containers. They were vast, fat, and burgeoning, and with hindsight planted too close together, but she never imagined that the skinny occupants of her pots would grow so much.
I have repotted two of the ginger lilies, or Hedychium, which needed it, though I wimped out of the third and decided that it would do one more season. Hedychium have fat surface roots (I don't know whether they are biologically rhizomes but don't have time to check, sorry) that elongate with time, throwing up shoots from the their newer end, while the old portion remains looking woody and doing nothing, rather like a bearded iris. In nature I presume they move on to conquer new ground. In a pot they go round and round until they become a congested mass, with some flowering material squeezed in round the edges, and a central dead zone that never throws up any stems. The odd desperate growth may venture over the edge of the pot, but finding nothing to root into remains dangling in mid-air.
Every few years they need extracting from their pots, and the newer portions repotting while the older ones can be chucked out. Now I have seen how they grow, I wonder whether a root I bought which never came back to life was down to my poor cultivation technique, or whether a hopeful or unscrupulous supplier had sent me an old piece that lacked the necessary dormant buds, but who knows? At any rate, you will find it easy to end up with one or two more plants while you are at it. If you can get a thoroughly congested mass of ginger lily roots out of a large terracotta pot without breaking the pot in the process then you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din, since my score this morning was repotted 2, smashed original pots 2, despite my attempts to free them sawing away with a bread knife and tapping the pot in a restrained way with a piece of wood. On the whole I should say, if you are going to grow ginger lilies, use cheap pots, as they will probably end up getting broken.
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