and another talk

Tonight I'm doing another talk, not a charity one, but a private enterprise talk to a gardening club, titled 'Colour and Interest in the Autumn Garden'.  I've just got back from work, as they kindly let me borrow plants to use as props.  I'll take them back in with me on Saturday, to keep the driving about to the minimum.  It's not a desperately remunerative activity, by the time you've taken into account all the time spent collecting plants and getting to the venue, but it's usually good fun, and I've met some nice people that way.  Also it keeps my hand in talking to groups, which might come in use again professionally at some point.  If I ran my own nursery then I'd get the profits on the sale of any plants that the audience like the sound of so much they want to take them home, but as it is proceeds on plant sales go to the boss.

Using live plants as props means that I never know in advance exactly what is going to be available, which gives a frisson of variety to each talk, compared with ploughing through the same set of slides each time.  Plus I get to keep the lights on, and am able to make eye contact with the audience throughout.  Some organisers say they actually prefer it as a format compared to slides, for those reasons, and I think quite a lot of people do enjoy the opportunity to see and touch the actual plants.  It can be difficult with species that don't do so well or last so long in pots, as they can be looking fantastic growing in the ground, when in their black plastic pots they have gone terribly manky, or been cut down already.  It is then up to me to describe their many virtues so that people can imagine how lovely they would be, if they weren't so horrible.  While I was picking out today's Skoda-full a colleague told me that somebody had been in recently and bought three plants of Ribes laurifolium on the strength of one of my talks (that would be Gardening for Bees) when at the time I hadn't even had a plant to show the audience because we'd been out of stock for months, so I must have managed to make that one sound nice.  Actually, it is very nice (or at least my plant is.  A friend who is a good gardener planted one over her dog's grave, and it died).

Plants for autumn colour include things that flower now, plus those with berries or leaf colour.  Not too much leaf colour, since that's more of an October thing, and anyway the car was full of flowers.  The plants in pots will be augmented by a few things picked from the garden, either because we had run out, or because they had finished flowering prematurely in their pots, or in the case of trees because I couldn't fit them in the car.  Fingers crossed the cut things don't shrivel up too much before about 8.30pm, which is the point at which I should have finished talking.

I try to take some rarities, but nothing too impossibly difficult.  People like to see something a bit different, but there's no point in lecturing them exclusively about plants that they would need several acres of space, or twice East Anglia's rainfall, to have any chance of growing them successfully.  I arrange the plants by theme, then pick each one up in turn, and tell the audience what the plant's main attractions are at the key points of the year, and how to grow it, in terms of what situation it would like to grow in, how to prune it if at all, and so on.  If the plant has interesting historical associations or medical uses or any other bit of associated lore that springs to mind then I chuck those in as well.

Tonight's goodies include a white flowered form of Lespedeza (less common than the purple ones, and we'd run out of purple); Buddleia crispa, a rare and tender form of buddleia with beautiful rounded leaves which I'm very tempted to try myself; a good form of Euonymus; and Abelia shcumannii, which you don't see as often as A. x grandiflora.  If time permits, the Abelia will act as a springboard to talk about one or two other rare-ish Abelia as well.

It all sounds rather hand knitted out of tofu, and when I started off I was slightly doubtful that the audience would wear it as a format, though I knew that the manager generally talks from plants rather than slides.  Maybe nowadays, when every house contains about three televisions and digital images are two a penny thanks to the internet, an actual live human being standing holding a live plant, and telling you about it while looking at you, has a sort of retro charm.  At any rate, it's my second visit to this club, so they know what they're getting.