pots for the porch

I called at B&Q on the way back from Colchester to get a box of cyclamen for the shelf in the porch.  I had some last year, lined up in small identical pots from Whichford, with marbled leaves and flowers in the palest shades of pink.  They lasted for months, and when they began to look tired I moved them into the greenhouse, and kept them very, very dry.  Over watering is fatal to potted cyclamen, and I was slow to start them back into growth.  Three have now grown tufts of healthy looking leaves, and the other three corms are still solid and probably alive, but for the shelf I wanted instant gardening.

The old plants have therefore been decanted into a terracotta trough, and I hope that now I've watered them properly they will continue to come back to life, in which case they can stand in the porch under the shelf.  I'll have to be careful not to over water the trough, since the cyclamen's roots certainly won't fill it.  Cyclamen in containers are magnets for vine weevil, and I don't generally reckon on getting more than one season out of them, so I was surprised that this lot survived as well as they did.  A fairly dry baking in the greenhouse for the summer seems to have suited them, and they have managed to duck the root aphid.  I thought about planting them out in the garden, but I'm not sure they would survive the winter.  B&Q don't make any claims for them one way or the other on the packaging, but they look as though they have a fair dose of the tender Cyclamen persica in their makeup.

The little pots have been refilled with new plants, going this year for stronger shades of pink and very strongly marked silvery leaves.  I paid seven pounds for a box of six plants, which is pretty good for something that should last until the other side of Christmas.  It helps the overall effect to have a set of six matching good quality pots.  I checked carefully for mould before buying them, and sure enough there were a few dead leaves already infected with botrytis.  This grey, fuzzy looking fungus is another scourge of potted cyclamen, and is a sign of bad air circulation and too much moisture.  I fastidiously picked off ever dead leaf and each faded flower, taking care to trace the stems right down to the base and not leave any stubs, and for good measure picked off the biodegradable fabric wrapping like a giant tea bag that they were growing in, and that you are supposed to leave on when planting.  I had to remove it anyway, so as to be able to nibble away at the corners of the rectangular root balls to make them fit my round pots.

Maybe I'll eventually get bored with cyclamen and want to try something different, but they produce such beautiful flowers, and the plants have good foliage as well.  And I think there is something positively chic about lining up a row of matching pots, like those interior design shots you see in magazines of identical flowers displayed in a rack of test tubes.  It is simpler and visually more arresting than my usual instinct which is to try all sorts of things and end up with a jumble of interesting plants.  In the confines of the porch, restricted to one small shelf, simple is good.