I had to evict the Norfolk Island Pine from the conservatory. The top was bending over where it touched the roof, again. I've been pushing the pot towards the back where the headroom is greatest, but with only another few centimetres to go it was time to bite the bullet. I'm very fond of this plant. We've had it since it was about 30cm tall, and it was originally bought to go on the telephone table. A recent newspaper report said that fewer and fewer people use or even have a landline (I think these are the young people who, as Jeremy Hardy puts it, use the interweb) and that mobiles are increasingly the norm. We do still have a landline, and the telephone table, though nowadays it houses the base station for the roaming phone handsets and you don't have to conduct your conversation in the hall unless you want to. However, the pine ceased to fit in there a long time ago.
Norfolk Island Pine is Araucaria heterophylla. It looks as though it were related to the Monkey Puzzle, Araucaria araucana, as indeed it is, with tiered branches, but it has needles of a bright mid-green that are much smaller than those of the Monkey Puzzle, and soft to the touch. It has made an excellent container specimen over many years, remaining fully clothed down to the ground, with no dieback, and apparently immune to all conservatory insect pests. Unfortunately it will become huge in time. One grows in a glass house at Kew, and it has had its top lopped off to accommodate it. And there's the rub. It is too tender to survive outside through a UK winter, but I don't want to have to cut its top off. It is a lovely shape as it is, and I should feel like a butcher pruning it. It looks very fine standing just outside the conservatory, beneath the veranda, and my mind has begun to run on wild schemes to wrap soil warming cable around the pot in winter, and make it a fleece tent to live in. An alternative plan is to try and find someone who has a taller conservatory than me and would be able to give it a loving home. I've got the summer to think about it. It would fit in the sitting room, if we moved the dining table right over and skirted around the pine to get to the bottom of the stairs, but while this is allowed for the Christmas tree I think my partner would draw the line at making it a permanent arrangement from September to April.
I had to evict my Echium pininiana from the greenhouse for exactly the same reason. This was raised from seed sown, acording to the label, on 19th February 2009. I got a poor germination rate, in that only two seedlings emerged, and by the time I'd concluded that that was my lot I didn't want to risk destroying the only two I had trying to separate them, so it has grown as a two-branched multistem. Accounts I've read about growing Echiums in containers have never been very encouraging, but this one is in a pot around the 35cm mark and has done respectably. At any rate, it is taller than the greenhouse and has got flower buds on its stems, though it isn't as lush as ones I've seen growing in the ground in places with gentler climates than north east Essex. The flowers, assuming things go according to plan and winter doesn't suddenly reappear with a final late frost (which could still happen) should be blue, and I think attractive to bees, and I ought to get self-sown seedlings, which will probably not survive the two winters outside they would need to do to flower. I could save seed, or salvage seedlings if they appear, and raise another one under glass.
If I were an oligarch I wouldn't bother with buying The Evening Standard, but I would like to have a house that was wrapped around three sides of a two or three storey atrium, so that I could grow these things in comfort.
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