The success of my third attempt to establish the California tree poppy Romneya coulteri in the back garden still seems to be hanging in the balance. There is a lusty specimen at the Chatto Gardens, in the dry garden just opposite the cafe, and I feel that it ought to be quite happy in the light soil where I'm trying to persuade it to grow, if it would only just give it a try. A well-grown Romneya is a thing of beauty, with stems around chest height covered in grey leaves, and large, single, white, poppy-like flowers with golden stamens. Once established it is supposed to run about, but the books all admit that it is notoriously difficult to establish. Mine is not running, so much as cowering on the spot.
I was pleased a while back to discover that it had at least made it through the winter, or rather one stem had, since that was one stem more than I'd seen in the second season of either of my previous plants. Then the single stem fell off, and I thought that after three failed attempts it might be time to call it a day. But then yesterday I read in Christopher Lloyd's Garden Flowers that it is best treated as a herb, cutting everything within sight to ground level in early winter, so thought that maybe in that case it might survive losing its only stem in August. Today, weeding the island bed as I replant it for the third time in as many years (third time lucky?) I found its little cluster of new shoots, next to where I had thoughtfully marked the spot with an iron plant support. They don't exactly look as though they were bursting with life and enthusiasm, on the other hand they are not dead, yet. I have been teasing the creeping sorrel out from around it, so I'll give it a top-dressing of mushroom compost and bonemeal and hope that something is happening underground, and that next year it will burst forth. The great man is less measured in his praise than I am, describing the plant as a thrilling spectacle, carrying abundance of pure white poppies, but I am curbing my enthusiasm in case mine dies again like the others did.
Occasionally I have to remember to curb my enthusiasm for Great Dixter, at least as far as trying to emulate it too far goes, when Lloyd reminds me that the soil there is heavy clay, and I remember that I am mostly dealing with starved sand, and that Dixter has been cultivated as a garden and presumably dosed with regular additions of compost since Edwardian times, whereas our site was an orchard which was probably dosed with nothing except unholy amounts of Simazine. Also, re-reading Garden Flowers I am forced to admit that at Dixter many areas of planting are changed several times a year, treating plants that I would use as perennials if I could even grow them at all as bedding plants, to be grown on to the point of flowering behind the scenes, installed in the borders to do their bit, and then moved or scrapped straight after flowering.
I have gone so far as to ignore the great master and plant a Phuopsis sylosa, which I saw and liked at Rosemoor, and Chistopher Lloyd dismisses on the basis that it smells of fox. It doesn't smell that bad to me, but then I don't have a great sense of smell. Phuopsis, in case you were wondering, is a herbaceous front of the border sort of thing, with thin green leaves and pink flowers. I raised several from seed, but lost most of the young plants in the greenhouse last winter, so today's was the sole survivor. We have a few left at work, so I might get a couple more. Lloyd says that it soon spreads beyond its allotted area, which sounds what I need, a vigorous creeper to fight it out with the creeping sorrel. Though talking of things that smell of fox, I was weeding around a box plant that was in flower, and that was truly disgusting. The Dead Queen Anne scrapped (or at least caused to be scrapped, I don't suppose she dug them up herself) all the box plants at Hampton Court because she disliked the smell.
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