wallflowers

Flushed by the relative success of the pots of Cosmos, and caught at the strategic psychological moment by an advertisement from Mr Fothergill for bare root wallflower plants, I am attempting to do pots of wallflowers.  I adore wallflowers.  I like their smell, and the range of tawny, tabby colours they come in, and the whole old fashioned vibe.  Each year I sigh over pictures and descriptions of them in the seed catalogues, and then don't order any seed, and if it ever comes free with a magazine I always forget to sow it at whatever odd stage of the summer you are supposed to sow biennials, just when it's hot in the greenhouse and you are busy with other things. And all the borders are densely planted up with permanent residents, except in the odd gaps for renovation where things have died or got too big for their boots, so there is nowhere suitable for bedding out.

Wallflowers in containers were clearly the answer.  True, I would then have to buy more compost, and it would be yet more pots to water, but still, that scent, and those velvety, four petalled flowers.  I ordered a bundle of dark orange ones and a bundle of purple, which entitled me to a third free bundle.  Yesterday an email arrived saying they had been dispatched, and this morning the postman appeared at the front door carrying the box carefully in both hands like a chalice, and the right way up.

I was planning to buy some more absolutely plain, straight sided, traditional flower pot shaped pots of 33cm diameter.  I'll need some anyway next year for the dahlias, and I thought I could get them now and use them in the meantime for the winter bedding.  It's a good, practical pot design in any case, allowing you to slide the root ball out for repotting.  The Salvia confertiflora in the conservatory needs to go into a bigger pot next year, though I won't do it now.  Altogether some more 33cm pots would be useful.

Except that the local garden centres have stopped doing them.  I went first to the one where I got a couple of straight sided pots back in the summer to repot some Agapanthus, but the stand where they used to be had been restocked with a different brand, one using rather bright orange terracotta and whose classic flower pots only went up to 11 inches.  It was the same at the other two places I tried as I doglegged my way home.  That was a blow.  I've been using that type of pot for the past twenty years.  They weren't totally frost proof, and did tend to crack if they fell over, but they were easy to handle and relatively cheap, and their mirror smooth interior finish helped when potting on.  It is much, much harder extracting a root ball from a pot whose inside surface is rough, or worse still ridged.

Instead the wallflowers are going into an eclectic collection of whatever medium sized pots I had in the shed.  They are in umpteen different designs, all with curved sides and many with mouths narrower than their maximum diameter, which makes them unsuitable for anything you might ever want to remove intact, but OK for bedding.  The initial result was not promising, since the plants seemed to have ridiculously tiny roots compared to their tops and had wilted in transit, so stood at odd angles looking pathetically floppy, but I told myself that wallflowers were traditionally sold bare root wrapped in newspaper, members of the cabbage family had a great capacity to wilt when transplanted before recovering miraculously overnight, Mr Fothergill knew what they were doing, and it would be fine.  I went on planting until I ran out of compost, watered my poor drooping plants into their new homes, and left them to it, thankful that it wasn't windy.

That leaves the longer term question of where to find 33cm straight sided pots with a smooth interior finish.  The siren voice in my head is saying that it is time to start collecting them from Whichford Pottery, now that I've got enough tulip pots.  I bought those over the space of about three years, and the cost was eye watering at the time, but of course now I've got them they'll last for the rest of my gardening career, unless I drop them.