in the conservatory

The first Hedychium gardnerianum flower has come out in the conservatory.  I smelt it as soon as I went in there to do the watering, before I even saw it.  They are very beautiful flowers, spikes of soft yellow trumpets with orange protruding stamens.  Until Google come up with Google Smell you will just have to take my word about the scent.  H. gardnerianum is a good value pot plant, flowering over quite a long period.  I also have 'Tara', which has lovely spikes in a mellow shade of orange, that sadly don't last for very long, and have been and gone by now.  Both of these make large plants, with leaf spikes up to 2m tall, which have a tendency to lean out from the clump, so an established plant, which will happily fill a 45cm pot, needs a fair allocation of floorspace.  They grow from spreading rhizomes, like a bearded iris, and when they get to the edge of the pot you can saw them up into smaller lumps and start again.

Also flowering is the Correa, or Australian fuchsia.  The flowers are pendant and bell-shaped, hence the common name, although the shrub doesn't really look anything like a fuchsia.  Mine is the variety 'Peachy Cream', which has yellow and pink flowers, no scent.  The leaves are evergreen, small and rounded, and slightly prone to insect attack leading to sooty mould, which it is impossible to wash off the individual tiny leaves as you could with something bigger.  I've tried Correa in the ground, and lost them, and nowadays stick to growing this one under cover.  They make rapid growth, are quite amenable to being griven a trim to keep them within their allotted space, and apart from the slight insect problem seem to make good long-term subjects for pots.

The first of my Camellia sasanqua has just finished its second flower.  This is the variety 'Plantation Pink', which by coincidence is the one photographed in Noel Kingsbury's article on how to grow them.  Presumably that means it is a relatively common one.  C. sasanqua are earlier to flower than the more familiar C. japonica and C. x williamsii, and in my experience not as easy to grow.  They are said to be relatively tender, and to require more sunlight than other camellia species, so I thought they sounded like ideal candidates for a west-facing conservatory, but they also seem to be much pickier about the watering regime.  Too much or too little and the leaves go brown at the tip end, and the buds mummify on the plant.  For several years they suffered from being grouped together out of the way in a corner for the long months when they were not in bloom, so now each has its own space, near the window at the sunnier end of the room, so that I can see properly how wet they are, and only water when needed but without letting them dry out.  The crop of buds is looking promising so far.  They make rather lanky plants, and I might follow Noel Kinsgsbury's advice and give them a trim after flowering.

Up the back wall the Plumbago auriculata is producing its sky-blue flowers, which are very pretty, and make me forgive the fact that I know that later the leaves will go brown without falling from the plant, and I will have to pick them off.  On the other side of the lead water spout (electric pump still trickling away, so that's another polar bear doomed) is the climbing Fuchsia 'Lady Boothby'.  This was a present from a friend who had bought about nine in a newpaper readers' offer, which was several more than he required for his own purposes.  Poor 'Lady Boothby' was left outside during the winter of 2009-10, and I thought she had perished.  A frail shoot appeared, but she spend all of last year recovering her strength, and I decided that she had better live inside.  She has large, red and purple typical fuchsia flowers, similar to classic varieties like 'Mrs Popple', and is quite a climber.  Her topmost tip in the conservatory must be approaching 3m, if not there.

Tropaeolum 'Ken Aslet' has not flowered at all.  This is a complete mystery to me.  I did ask the manager at work, but he said it was a mystery to him too.  Maybe it needs a bigger pot.  The tuber was only about the size of a conker, so a huge pot seemed silly.  Maybe it wants seaweed, or tomato food, or to be in stronger light?  Who knows?  However, a Hoya that another friend gave me, who rooted it from a plant that belonged to her grandmother, has suddenly gone a darker shade of green and is looking more decidedly alive, having made some new leaves.  It has been desperately, awfully slow to make roots, and at one point I thought I'd killed it.  I did kill my white flowered Begonia evansiana (much less usual than the pink) but it cropped up again this years as a squatter in a pot of Cautleya (a miniature ginger lily relative), so it must have managed to make a few bulbils on its stems last year.  I peered hopefully at this year's leaf axils in search of baby plantlets, but there are none properly developed yet.  It's lucky I didn't weed them out, as the pink flowered form spreads itself so generously it could almost be a weed.

I like the conservatory very much.  Having a proper garden room, with lights and electric plugs, that doesn't leak or rattle or let the wind howl through it and can be kept frost-free in winter, that I am allowed to fill with plants, gives me the same buzz that owning a really, really good luxury car might give a petrol-head.