Wednesday 28 May 2014

revamping the conservatory

Today I turned my attentions to the conservatory.  Compared to the healthy, glowing plants that we saw growing in their pots at Chelsea, I had to admit that some of the plants in our conservatory were not very nice.  Some used to be healthy and ornamental, and have gone downhill with age and, dare I say it, neglect.  Others were just never happy, despite my best efforts, and have got steadily worse.  In the case of Lapageria rosea, worse to the point of being dead.  Alas, I have seen them grown well in the Edwardian conservatory at Hergest Croft, and know how wonderful they can be, but mine was never remotely like that despite my best efforts with leaf mould.  The fact that the emerging new leaves were magnets for snails did not help.

Growing plants under glass is not easy.  Keeping plants long term in containers is not easy either. Put the two together and you have a positive maelstrom of not-easiness.  Red spider mite, mealybug, scale insect, summer heat, winters that last for months and leave you fretting about the cost of running even a modest fan heater, over-watering or under-watering pots that are too large and heavy to lift to find out how wet they are already, roots that resent being constricted, rootballs so huge you balk at trying to haul them out of their pots to at least replace a few inches of compost around them.

The fun is in being able to grow things that would not cope all year round in the open garden, and more especially in creating a fabulous, sheltered jungle in which to sit.  One of my favourite pieces of Raymond Chandler, which must have been one of his favourite images too since he went through multiple drafts of it, is his description of the rich, old and ill General Sternwood receiving Philip Marlowe in his hot and humid orchid house.  Our budget doesn't run to an orchid house, and the Systems Administrator dislikes humidity, but the idea of the jungly den is there.  If I were terribly rich and having a house designed and built for me, I would have it run round three sides of a quadrangle, the fourth wall of the quad being glass, and the whole roofed over to make a two storey atrium, in which I could grow temperate tropical trees.  I would have walkways across the atrium at first floor level, so that I could wander among the branches of my trees, like at Kew.

We do not have this.  Instead we have a west facing garden room, with three double glazed glass walls, a brick rear wall and a polycarbonate roof.  The growing conditions are slightly shady through most of it, not generally too hot as long as I remember to open both doors in summer, and just about frost free in winter if I run the heater in cold spells.  It tends to get rather damp and dank in winter, because I am stingy with the heater.  There are two rattan chairs and a table, but no carpet, as I use it as a proper space for growing plants.  Whoever has the house after us will probably ditch the plants and use it as a garden room, with a full complement of furniture.

The Phoenix palm is doing well.  I have had it for years, since it was a tiny thing.  It sits in a fairly shaded corner against the back wall, and I always believed it was easy to grow, until I read a book about palms and discovered how prone they were to root rots, and how lucky I was that mine was still alive.  I now make a conscious policy of benign neglect, and worry each time I water it in case I am overdoing it.  It is many years since it was repotted, and it does not live in special palm compost, just ordinary multipurpose.  The fact that it is almost bursting out of its pot helps with the not-overwatering.

The Wollemi pine is doing well.  It has started to bear cones at long last, and I have just about recovered from the emotional trauma of having to cut the top out of it, because it had hit the roof, and there was no more space to move it further towards the back wall to give it more headroom.  In the wild these form multi-stem clumps, and I am waiting to see if mine throws any further stems.

The climbing fuchsia 'Lady Boothby' is happy on the shady back wall.  She was a present from a friend who had bought a whole bunch of young plants in a newspaper readers' offer, and didn't want all of them.  I used to leave her outside in her pot, but after the first cold winter when I thought she'd died, I brought her inside when I discovered she was still alive.  She took some time to recover fully from the indignity, but flowers well nowadays and grows rampantly.

Several other things are not so happy.  More of them anon.  We can learn so much more from our (and other people's) failures than by only hearing the success stories.


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