It was so murky this morning that I couldn't even see the wind turbine from the bathroom window, but the rain had passed. The still, damp, not too cold air provided perfect conditions to actually be able to smell the witch hazels in the back garden. On very cold days, or when there's a stiff breeze, their scent can be pretty elusive, but there was no missing it today. Above the spicy tang of the Hamamelis drifted the insistent, sweet fragrance of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill'. The bush has thrown up more suckers since I potted the last lot up, and one of them is blooming. I saw to my pleasure that the flowers were the same as on the rest of the plant, meaning that the original wasn't grafted. I didn't think it was, as I never saw any signs of the graft, and you usually can if you look closely, but it's nice to have confirmation that my two spare plants in pots in the greenhouse are 'Jacqueline Postill' and not a nameless and inferior rootstock.
I put canes along the edge of the wood to mark the spot where they will go in a month or so, once the risk of a freezing blast in February is over. The parent plant has come through two severe winters here, but small, newly planted specimens can be vulnerable, and they have spent all winter in the greenhouse and never yet experienced a frost in their lives. I planted the Oemleria cerasiformis, and surrounded it with a wire netting cage to try and keep the rabbits and muntjac off it until it has had time to get established. It is a suckering shrub, and the boss gives its ultimate dimensions as 2.5m tall by 4m across, so once it gets going I don't think the rabbits will make much of an impact. Surveying the small tuft of sticks that is all the Oemleria runs to at the moment, and the two bamboo canes standing in for the Daphne, I tried to visualise their full spread at maturity and wondered hopefully if there was space for the plum red flowering Hamamelis x intermedia 'Livia', which we have started stocking for the first time this year. It is very handsome, and in a different part of the red spectrum to the others, and I should dearly like to grow it, but I had to admit that there probably wasn't room for one, or at least not anywhere where it would get enough light. If we have any left at work come the weekend then I may yet talk myself into the contrary position.
Daphne bholua 'Alba' is out as well. It is a pretty thing, which has only grown to half the height of 'Jacqueline Postill', and so far is not suckering at all, so could be a good choice for a small space. The wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, is blooming. I bought mine as the pure yellow form, but the flowers have a definite smudge of purple on the inside. It has been quite slow growing in its early years. The scent of Daphne bholua was so strong that it was difficult to detect whether the wintersweet smelt of anything or not. It is certainly supposed to. Further up the garden, Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' has suddenly opened. The flowers are single, about the size of a penny or a little larger, in a good, clear, strong shade of dark pink. They have no scent, and nor has the lovely Lonicera 'Elisae', which is just opening its slender, tubular flowers in a delicate, tantalising shade of very pale melon pink.
After sorting out the Oemleria, I re-potted my three Acer palmatum. One existing pot had fractured and partially delaminated due to frost. I'd made temporary repairs with glue, but knew it was only a matter of time before I went out into the back garden and discovered the root ball of my poor Acer exposed to the elements, with bits of disintegrated pot scattered around it. It needed more root space anyway. I decided to re-pot the other two while I was at it, partly because they needed potting on, one badly so, and partly because I wanted to standardise on the same design of pot for purely aesthetic reasons.
I have seen the light when it comes to pot design. After a flirtation with egg shaped pots, very trendy in the early part of the new century and now so horribly last decade, I have come to appreciate the enormous, practical virtues of the traditional flower pot shaped pot, one whose diameter expands steadily from the base upwards. The design I have fixed on, with minor variations depending on the manufacturer, is the classic camellia pot, a thick walled, sloping sided pot with a couple of horizontal ribs round the outside. I presume that these evolved to strengthen the walls of the pot, as well as for ornament. The camellia pot is a design classic which has remained essentially unchanged since the Renaissance, because nobody has been able to improve on it in hundreds of years. You can see the same pots scattered through the illustrations to Monty Don's Great Gardens of Italy.
The trouble with egg shaped pots is that the diameter at the top is narrower than the widest part of the root ball. Getting an established shrub out, let alone one that has been allowed to become at all pot-bound, is a brutal job. I had to get the Systems Administrator to pull from above at the Acer that was still in an egg pot, while I scrabbled at the edges of the root system, scraping off compost until I'd narrowed the root ball down enough for us to drag it out of the pot (the alternative is to smash the pot with a lump hammer). Getting a shrub out of a flared flower pot is a comparative doddle. Once you've broken the surface connection between the mass of roots and compost and the inside of the pot, and got the root ball to slide even a couple of millimetres, the rest is easy. I did ask for help lifting a big Acer that was going from one camellia pot into a larger one, but that was a question of bulk and gravity, not pot design.
No comments:
Post a Comment