plant heritage

I went this morning to my inaugural meeting of Plant Heritage.  This used to be the National Society for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens, which was quite a mouthful.  It still lurks on in the small print, and is embedded in the address of their website.  It's a conservation charity for garden plants, which are always liable to disappear as fashions change, and small, specialist nurseries come and go.  I was invited to go to a propagation workshop by two of the organisers at a garden club I spoke to recently.  I've often looked at Plant Heritage displays at RHS shows over the years, and probably even picked up a membership form once or twice, without ever quite getting round to joining.

This time I thought that the garden club ladies were being friendly, and it would be nice to know some more out and out plant enthusiasts to talk to, since giving up the day job.  I don't miss the eight o'clock Sunday starts, or the fifty-fifty chance of having to decline any weekend social invitation ranking lower in the scale of human importance than a wedding, let alone the blessed cafe, but I do miss the chance to talk about plants with people.  And Plant Heritage do plant swaps, and plant fairs, and it would probably be a way of getting hold of some unusual and unexpected additions to the garden from time to time.

We started with Eucomis, exotic looking bulbs of dubious hardiness, which disappear completely in the winter, before producing the tiniest sharp snout of new leaves in spring.  It gradually expands to a fleshy clump, plus if you are lucky a flowering spike topped with a tuft of leaves like a miniature pineapple.  I have three living in pots, which go into the greenhouse for the winter, and I was intrigued before we even started propagating to hear that others in the group grew them outside. Sharp drainage is apparently key, but I can provide that.  To make more Eucomis, you cut the fleshy leaves into sections an inch to an inch and a half long, and bury them to most of their depth in compost, keeping them the same way up as they were growing.  No grit, no vermiculite, just compost.  According to instructions provided by the National Collection Holder, the Plant Heritage sanctioned official keeper of as many Eucomis varieties as possible, the heat of a greenhouse in summer should be sufficient, keeping them shaded.  New plants should form along the edges of the cut sections.

I had absolutely no idea that you could take Eucomis leaf cuttings, not that I ever looked into it before, and made a mental note to try it at home.  They would look good in the gravel by the entrance, but I'd be more in the mood to experiment with home made plants than bulbs I'd had to pay for.  I should have asked my fellow enthusiasts who clearly knew more about Eucomis than I do why mine don't always flower.  Perhaps I was saving confessions of ignorance until I felt more securely part of the group.

Then we did bulb scaling, in which you cut the top off a snowdrop, or daffodil bulb, remove the outside skin, pare back the basal plate to a thin sliver, and slice the bulb vertically into eight or even sixteen fragments, every one with a little piece of basal plate.  You put the bits in a bag of damp vermiculite, put it in the airing cupboard, and if you have managed to keep everything clean and sterile new bulblets should form on each section of basal plate.  I knackered my first bulb because after slicing the top off, I absent mindedly sliced most of the bottom off as well as if it were an onion, before remembering what I was supposed to be doing.  We were given our bags of chopped bulbs and vermiculite to take home, and I'll see how mine does, but I don't think I'm likely to take up anything requiring that degree of sterility on a regular basis.  Like reading descriptions of cheese making, it sounds interesting but not really me.  (One of the group worked for a specialist local nursery, and had brought a couple of pints of a commercial grade fungicide for us to soak our bulb scales in.  She had used a two pint plastic milk container, and despite it being labelled as fungicide in large letters, somebody did manage to pour some into their tea).

The organiser had brought crates of recently rooted cuttings for us to help prick out into individual pots.  That's a job that six pairs of hands can handle fairly quickly, along with writing out the extra labels, whereas alone in your greenhouse it would be a good half day's work.  The plants were destined for Plant Heritage sales, once they'd rooted in and been potted on again.  Someone else was demonstrating softwood cuttings, which I've done at home, but had no idea of the range of plants you could strike by that method.  She didn't bother with rooting hormones for any of them, which is interesting to know.  My technique of firming rooted cuttings down as I pot them individually is not approved by Plant Heritage, or at least not this branch of it, which goes to show that there are as many methods of taking cuttings as there are of making goulasch, that is one per gardener, or cook.  My cuttings have always moved on quite happily, and when potting bare root divisions at the plant centre we were told to firm the compost around the roots, though not excessively.  Still, it was their group, so I did it their way.