making more

In recent days I've been planting out some of the things I raised myself, from seeds and cuttings.  I love propagation at all sorts of levels.  There's a raw thrill when seeds germinate or cuttings stay perky until the first white roots are visible through the drainage holes in the bottom of the pot, quite irrespective of whether you need the plants or what you are going to do with them.  And seed can be a way of obtaining species that aren't available as growing plants.  And it's a comparatively cheap way of getting a lot of plants, useful when you have space to fill.  Even though the seed orders still seemed to come to a vast amount after they had been pruned, and pruned again, and some of the pots never germinated, when you have a tray of eight strong young plants in your hand, each of which would have cost anything between two pounds fifty and a fiver if you'd bought it, at that moment the seeds seem a bargain.  And as for home saved seed, and cuttings from plants you already have in the garden, it really is something for nothing, just some pennies for the compost, and your own time.

Time is what so many gardeners don't have.  I'm often surprised on visits to gardens open to the public whose owners are clearly plant lovers that they don't have a greenhouse or seem to do anything in the way of propagation.  There again, that's partly how they make the time to keep the garden weeded and maintained to a standard fit for public viewing.  My home made plants co-exist with a great number of weeds and lengths of wispy lawn edges, which I could be doing something about if I weren't fiddling about for days at a time in the greenhouse.  Confidence may have something to do with it too.  When I worked at the plant centre, if customers were pleasant and chatty and buying something that I knew was easy to bulk up, I'd sometimes mention it, but used to get a mixed response.  Some were delighted at the idea of making more and still more, but others looked faintly alarmed, as if I'd suggested they take up marathon running or hang gliding.

And no, I did not feel as though I were doing my employers out of potential sales, because I knew that the customers keen and energetic enough to save their own seeds and take cuttings would spend any money they saved on buying more plants.  Enthusiasts are like that.  I don't do illegal music downloads myself, but I believe the reports that say the people who do the largest number of illegal, unpaid downloads also buy the most music.

Some of today's plants were extra Primula florindae, grown from home harvested seed.  I was slightly less thrilled with them than I would have been if the existing P. florindae hadn't been so obliging about sowing itself around the bog bed without my help, but the plants out of the greenhouse came in handy to fill in odd gaps and extend its range.  Their common name is giant cowslip, and they hail originally from south east Tibet.  The whorls of yellow flowers on long stems come later in the season than most primula, which is useful of them, but one of the most useful features from my point of view is that they will grow in both normal damp soil and mud soup.  When you read the small print you find that an awful lot of moisture loving plants actually need reliably moist but well drained soil, and if the water table rises under them so that they are sitting in six inches of liquid mud they will drown or rot.

Just uphill of the soup zone went Phacelia bolanderi.  This is a perennial relative of the blue flowered annual Phacelia tanacetifolia most often sold as a green manure.  The annual is greatly loved by bees, and I'm hoping the perennial version will be an equal hit.  It is a native of Oregon and coastal northern California, so you can see it is like the United Nations in the back garden, Tibet to Oregon in two paces.  There is only one UK supplier of grown plants listed in the RHS Plantfinder (Beeches, as it happens, so I could have got to them at a pinch) so growing your own has definite appeal.  I am not convinced the Phacelia is going to be the longest lived perennial, but am hoping it will seed itself, so joining the community of sweet rocket, honesty, Verbena bonariensis, and a borage relative with brick red flowers and extraordinarily hairy and tenacious seeds called Cynoglossum dioscoridis, which persist from year to year in the garden even though the individual players come and go.