Saturday 24 February 2018

awaiting the arctic blast

The little red flowers of the Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' have opened in the past couple of days.  Red is indeed an eye-catching colour.  I first spotted them out of the sitting room window across the full width of the garden, and this morning went out for a closer look before the Arctic Blast could spoil them.  I hope it doesn't, as they are so pretty, and the one attractive thing that the tree does in the entire year.  With some plants you can console yourself that there will be a second flush of flowers, or that the autumn leaves are good, but some sap-sucking insect always attacks the Prunus, causing its leaves to pucker and twist horribly.  In fact, I am amazed it has grown as much as it has given how damaged its leaves appear each summer.

This is my second attempt at growing it.  There used to be a fashion for offering little top-worked standards of 'Beni-chidori' and I bought one to grow in a pot, thinking the flowers would harmonise well with the pink camellia outside the conservatory, but the branches of the standard kept dying back until it was almost reduced to a stub, and I threw it away.  I managed to find a small tree just grown as a normal tree, not trained as a lollipop, and planted it in the open border in not especially nice soil.  You could tell the soil was not so good in that stretch, firstly because the hedge never grew as fast, and secondly because the previous tree refused to grow until eventually it gave up the ghost entirely.  The Prunus, cosseted with regular applications of mushroom compost and blood, fish and bone, is gently but steadily growing.  I hope its flowers last beyond Tuesday, but don't know how they will respond to snow.

The Crocus tommasinianus in the bottom lawn were stretched wide open to the sun this morning.  Poor, deluded Crocus.  No bees were flying to pollinate them in this wind.  I am not sure there will be anything left of them either after the snow.

In the afternoon I went to a plant lecture which, unusually for plant lectures around here, was frankly dreadful.  That was an achievement in itself, since the topic was Kirstenbosch, which has a fascinating and diverse flora, and it would take a real talent not to make it interesting, but the lecturer persevered.  He had acetate slides, which kept sticking in the projector, and he did not have a remote control so kept standing right by the machine and in front of the image, provoking heckling from the front row.  Some of the slides were so dark you really couldn't see anything anyway, and sometimes as the lecturer strove to make out what was on them he addressed his remarks to the back wall of the hall on which they were projected, instead of the audience.  The talk itself rambled about with no structure that I could discover, beyond what he did on his holidays, or rather what he did on a field trip seventeen years ago.  There were frequent references to a map, but he did not show us the map at the beginning, though he had copies in a box on the stage for people to take away afterwards.  And he was not projecting his voice, so while I could hear in the third row I don't suppose they could at the back, and he did not enunciate so I missed the names of the plants I didn't already know.

I thought grumpily as I drove home that really it had not been worth giving up an afternoon's gardening and a round trip of over forty miles.  Getting out of the car when I arrived home, though, as the icy wind hit me I had to admit that even if I hadn't been to the talk I might not have been gardening.

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