Monday 7 July 2014

taking a phlegmatic view

Nature gives, and nature takes away.  There was a brisk, drying wind today, after half a gale last night, and bright sunshine, so the effects of yesterday's little bit of rain won't last long.  I ran the hose on the parts of the long bed with the worst soil, and on recently planted areas, moving it every so often.  I was not delighted to discover when I came to plant out my new Watsonia that one of them had root aphid.  On the other hand, I was not so outraged as I might have been if I didn't manage a greenhouse myself, and know how it can sneak in, and if I hadn't worked in plant retail and so understand that to maintain a range as wide as they do at Beeches, plants are necessarily going to spend some time in their pots.

It makes me sigh mentally when I read articles aimed at new gardeners telling them how to buy plants, which solemnly warn them not to touch anything with weeds in the pots, or liverwort, as it will be old, geriatric and not worth planting after being in the pot for too long.  It may be, it may not.  Weeds and liverwort can grow extremely quickly, and many plants (probably most) can live happily in a pot for longer than it takes to sprout a crop of hairy bittercress, as long as they are properly watered.  If you go to a DIY store with a very fast stock turn, you will not see liverwort on the pots (though that is partly because the staff will probably have let the plants die from lack of water first), but you will not get the range and choice of plants either.  Nurseries which carry a choice of four or five different sorts of Watsonia are likely to take a while to sell them all.

I drenched the Watsonia with Provado, along with the Ozothamnus which was also affected, and will check the other pots as I go.  I sent a polite email to Beeches warning them that they had root aphid in their stock, and that while I was dealing with my plants myself, they might want to do something about theirs.  It wasn't a complaint as such, and I'm certainly not going to take the plants back.  I just thought they ought to know.  The Watsonia looked very fine and handsome in the gravel of the turning circle, once planted, and I began to have beautiful fantasies of what interesting hybrid offspring they might produce with the existing soft orange W. pillansii, the brick red and the pink. That is not so unlikely as some of my gardening fantasies, since the books say they do hybridise, and I know the seed is not hard to germinate or grow on, because that's now I got my stock of orange ones in the first place.

It proved quite difficult to find anything on the web about how to grow Ozothamnus selago tumidus, but the description on one US nursery website said that it was not drought tolerant.  That is a pity, and slightly surprising given its silvery leaves, attenuated like a whipcord hebe, look as though they were adapted to overcome water shortage.  On the other hand, I did not do well trying to grow O. rosmarinifolius in the island bed in the back garden, which gets pretty dry, as its lower branches kept going brown and bald.  This irritating habit was shared by the plant centre's stock of Ozothamnus, which tended to make horrible specimens in pots.  But if I put my new plant quite close to the blue summerhouse it should just be out of the arid zone and in the better, damper vein of soil, and it can always get the odd splash when I'm watering the pots outside the summerhouse.

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