Watering all the pots outside took a long time this morning, as I gave each one a dose of liquid feed (except those I'm afraid of poisoning, the camellias, the phoenix palm and a miserable Lapageria which is eaten by snails each time I take my eyes off it, but lives on in an almost leafless state). I used B&Q's own brand of balanced plant food, mixed somewhat on the weak side, one capful (it is a very small cap) to a can of water. Most of the ivy leaved geraniums are doing disgracefully badly, and at the current rate of progress are headed for the compost bin rather than the greenhouse at the end of the season. Maybe I should have fed them more frequently, or maybe the cold wet summer after the long British winter was just too discouraging for them. I'll start again next year with fresh, vigorous plants.
Some things have done unexpectedly well recently. A Hoya, given to me by a friend who rooted it from her grandmother's plant, has suddenly made about a metre of extension growth. Still no flowers, but at least it looks healthy. For months after I was given it the thing refused to grow at all, and when I decided to try repotting it in fresh and different compost turned out to have a very shaky root system. It has abandoned the green florist's cane I gave it, and is winding itself around the other plants on the stand in the middle of the conservatory, so I think it will soon be time to move it to a larger pot, and give it something more substantial to climb up. However, the Tropaeolum tuberosum 'Ken Aslet' is doing what it did last year, and sending out shoots that go yellow and die again without having produced even one orange and yellow long spurred flower in early July. I nust spend an hour or two researching the requirements of this plant (and the Lapageria), since whatever they are, I'm clearly not meeting them.
Then I returned to digging out the weeds from the entrance bed. I'm starting to think foliage interest for the ground cover, large areas of rounded shapes of clipped box and Santolina. Magazine photographs of hillside gardens in Provence may well have permeated my thinking, but I'm not too proud to borrow a good idea when I see one. Totally new ideas in gardening are very rare. Derek Jarman's garden was new, and expanded our ideas of what a garden could be. I can't think of any other recent ones offhand. The prairie planting movement that started in Germany and the Netherlands, and has been researched by academics at Sheffield university, is newish, but only really a development of natural planting ideas put forward by William Robinson, and Christopher Lloyd's championing of exotic planting spawned a legion of imitators, but was again a return to Victorian values. By garden ideas I mean schemes that are actually built, and function in the real world over a period of several years, so I don't count some of the more garish schemes we've seen at Chelsea.
The Systems Administrator is off for another day's cricket, so at four I unleashed the chickens of mass destruction, and busied myself dead-heading the dahlias and lavender, and trimming the box domes by the front door, while they fossicked around in the Eleagnus hedge. The rooster does not like going in the hedge, but patrols along the edge of it. I do need them to go back into their run very soon, since the SA has just rung and need's collecting from Colchester station in just over half an hour. I might have to resort to bribery in the form of sultanas.
James Taylor is playing in this test match. The SA was dismissive when I said that we'd seen him make a county century at Lord's, the time the SA took me there, then worked out that our trip was two years ago, and realised that I was probably right. You see, even though I am not terribly interested in sport, I was paying attention. I remembered James Taylor, because he is very little, and looked very young, and I think that may have been his first century in a county match. The SA will be able to put me right. One of the attractions of cricket to its aficionados is the statistics.
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