A digger arrived in the car park at work, and began to remove the large heap of earth piled up at one edge, which has been there longer than I have. I think it is topsoil from when the old tennis court was dug out to put down hardcore to make the car park. We have dumped old potting compost and prunings there since, but it couldn't all be potting compost. We can't have bought that much compost in the entire history of the business. I had previously suggested that we should carve it into a piece of land art, maybe a giant recumbent crocodile, but the boss never sounded very keen on that idea. The earth is being deposited on bits of the farm where it will be useful. They needed the whole centre of the car park to turn the tractor and farm trailer being used to cart the earth away, so it's fortunate we weren't too busy, and the customers all chose to park around the edge.
I spent part of the day trimming old flower stalks and dead leaves from the iris and day lilies (Hemerocallis), and pulling out any weeds from the pots. Advice to novice gardeners sometimes includes the warning never to buy any plant with weeds or liverwort in the pot, as it will be old and pot-bound. This is based on a kernel of good sense, but oversimplified. Liverwort, hairy bittercress and annual grass can all grow very quickly in the comfortable environs of a pot which is regularly watered. If you shop anywhere with a reasonably broad range of stock, their stockturn is not going to be so rapid that everything is sold before it has time to grow a few weeds or an odd patch of liverwort. If every pot is clean that tells you that they employ a lot of staff and that the manager or owner is hot on pot-cleaning. A pot with a fresh surface of pristine compost may contain a geriatric plant, that has recently had the top weedy layer of compost scraped off and a new sprinkle added. Or in a good establishment (like ours, most of the time) it may contain a perfectly good plant which has nonetheless been weeded and tidied up fairly recently.
What you need to learn to detect are the old, tired, potbound plants, that will not grow away well when planted out, but that is harder to do and more difficult to explain than saying 'don't buy the ones with liverwort'. If the leaves are too small and too pale, and if there is no extension growth on woody plants in spring and summer, that's a bad sign. But then you need to know what colour and size the leaves ought to be, and how to recognise new growth. If the plant is significantly cheaper than others of a similar type and same sized pot then it may be last year's, or the year before. And if the label is badly weathered, faded and cracked or broken, that's a sign of age, as are rusty staples holding the label to the pot. Staples do rust outside, but at a slower pace than liverwort grows. Helpful garden journalists also tell you to tip the plant out of its pot and inspect the roots, which is a good idea, except that most customers don't come shopping with a pair of gardening gloves, and don't seem to want to risk tipping compost down their clothes, or are afraid of dropping or breaking the plant. These same garden writers advise that a good garden centre won't mind if you do this. Actually, if you try it with something freshly potted and get great piles of compost on our gravel paths we probably will mind, only we will be too polite to say so.
Somebody rang to ask whether we had a particular iris in stock that we were listed in the RHS Plant Finder as selling. We hadn't, but she and I had an interesting conversation while waiting to see if the manager would become free so that I could ask him when we were likely to get any (he didn't, so I never discovered the answer to that one). It turned out that she was trying to track down enough varieties to qualify as a National Collection holder for this type of iris. The National Collections scheme is run by Plant Heritage, formerly the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens, a name which did not exactly trip off the tongue. The idea is that keen gardeners amass different species or varieties of whatever plant has grabbed them, thus helping to ensure that the species and varieties are not lost to cultivation as fashions change. Obviously an idle would-be collection holder would go for something where there aren't many different sorts, like Gunnera, and not hardy Geranium or Hemerocallis where there are umpteen thousand varieties, many of which are distressingly similar. I don't have any desire to join in myself, lacking the collector's instinct and being quite happy with mongrel seedlings if they are healthy and attractive garden plants, but I can see that it is a worthy exercise.
According to the iris collector, the rules are that (among other things) you must hold at least three-quarters of the varieties listed in the Plant Finder. She was frustrated that she had rung many named stockists, only to find that they didn't physically have the plants. I explained to her a little about the seasonal stocking patterns of retail plant centres, and that places like us that didn't do much of our own propagating tended to buy in herbaceous stock in spring and summer, and not hold too much of it over the winter, given that plants like iris need to come inside under cover if they are in plastic pots, and we don't have that much covered space. Also, growers raise plants in batches, and sometimes don't have a batch ready for sale, maybe not until the next growing season once they have sold what they've got. The Plant Finder is updated annually, so doesn't reflect seasonal variations in availability, and the garden centre owner has to predict in advance what they will have succeeded in propagating, or sourcing. Unexpected hitches can then occur, as crops fail, suppliers go bust, or sterling tanks against the euro and they decide to skip the order from that grower in Boskoop. I did think, and suggested, that maybe the top people in Plant Heritage and the top people in the RHS should discuss the issue, with the aim of trying to discourage plant retailers from continuing to claim to stock plants that they have little realistic chance of getting. If the plant selling trade artificially inflates the stated number of varieties in commerce this does have the effect of raising the bar for National Collection holders, and inhibiting a conservation effort which I'm sure the RHS supports in principle.
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