As I continued to saw and hack my way down the edge of the wood, watched with beady eyed curiosity by the chickens, I suddenly heard a faint scream and a crash from the front of the house. It was not an absolutely piercing scream of panic, more a startled cry, and I stopped to put down my saw before walking over moderately briskly to see what had happened, rather than hurling my tools to the ground and sprinting. The Systems Administrator likes to take a break before lunch and sit in the garden, weather permitting, and there's a limit to how much damage you can do to yourself sitting. This didn't sound like a life threatening emergency, but more as though the deckchair might have collapsed.
The Systems Administrator, tablet in hand, was standing in front of the porch looking slightly shocked, and three of the orange flowered begonias lay in a mess of shattered terracotta in the porch underneath the shelf. They fell off, said the SA, gesturing at the begonias. I was sitting there in the porch and they just fell off. They startled me rather.
I picked up one of the pots that had not fallen off, and it weighed light in my hand. While the plant was not flagging it could definitely have done with some water. Looking at the height of the plants by this stage of the summer versus the size of the pots, I came to the conclusion that by now they were top heavy. A gust of wind bouncing back off the wall at a moment when the compost was dry had been enough to knock three of them off the shelf.
I apologised to the SA for the shock, and the SA expressed regret that my plants had been damaged. I went and found buckets, picked up the plants, the broken pots and smashed stems, and put the begonias in new plastic pots for now, pending a decision on whether to try and overwinter them. They'd survived the fall perfectly well, just minus a few stalks, but I didn't reckon on my chances of getting them to stand up and look presentable for the remainder of the season.
One of the things to emerge in the wreckage was a label telling me what sort of begonia they were, which was handy because I'd forgotten. Begonia 'Glowing Embers', according to the label, winner of the Best New Plant Award at the 2010 National Plant Show, according to an archive Telegraph article. I hadn't known that when I bought them, I just thought they were fun. As is the way once you've bought something, you start noticing other people's, and so I have clocked them at the Yellow Book open garden I went to with my parents, and in some giant pot displays at East Ruston. The internet was full of advertisements from firms who would sell me 'Glowing Embers', but less generous with advice on whether and how to keep it through the winter. That's only natural, since the seed companies, garden centres and DIY stores would all like to sell me some more plants next spring.
There was a discussion on one internet forum, where nobody seemed entirely certain if it made a tuber or had fibrous roots, but consensus was that if kept dryish and frost free it would die back naturally and was likely to shoot again next year, only later than the ones for sale in garden centres. I think that on balance I'll try and over-winter my plants, if only out of curiosity to see if it can be done, though I'll have to buy some replacement pots. If they do survive the winter I might be able to move them up into slightly bigger containers, which might make them more stable (though that bit heavier and more dangerous if they manage to fall on anybody next year).
In the meantime the remaining two pots of 'Glowing Embers' are safely down at ground level on the gravel. The winter display will have to start early, and I have bought half a dozen pink cyclamen with attractive marbled leaves in The Range, which is doing three for a fiver. They are even scented, as I discovered carrying them over to the greenhouse packed into a plastic bag. The effect probably won't be very noticeable out in the open as the winter winds rip through the front garden, but the postman might get the odd whiff.
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