a talk

I have just got back from doing a garden club talk about Colour and Interest in the Autumn Garden.  This was a handy booking, partially making up for the fact that I took last weekend off to go to the wedding, but it took up a fair amount of the day, by the time I'd been up to the plant centre to borrow the plants.  It is fairly convenient for the manager to talk from live plants and not slides, because he's there five days a week, but as a part-timer talks don't always fall conveniently close to my days at work.

In many ways it would be more efficient to put some slide shows together, now that I've learnt how to construct a digital presentation.  I'd put more time into it than I did for the talk to the beekeepers, if it were a proper paid gig, and once I'd assembled each set of images I'd have them for future use.  And given that they aren't my plants and I'm not on commission it doesn't make a great difference to me whether I sell plants or not.  On the other hand, people do seem to like the live plants.  Maybe they like to be able to touch and smell, instead of just looking at an image on the screen, or maybe it is more interesting listening to somebody talk when the lights are on and you can see their face than when they are lecturing you in the dark.  Actual pots with real plants in them bring a touch of theatre to the proceedings.

The trouble with talking from whatever my employers have in stock at the time is that sometimes they don't have things I want to talk about.  The choice then is whether to give up on the idea of that plant and talk about something else instead, or take a sample from the garden.  I took some twigs and sprigs tonight, as there were some varieties I wanted to cover that weren't easily interchangeable with anything else.  There is a lovely late flowering aster, for example, Aster pilosus var. pringlei 'Monte Cassino', which has tiny white flowers, very narrow bright green leaves, bulks up well in the garden, and is incredibly drought tolerant.  It really does flower now, in late October, and there is nothing else quite like it.  It is so good that for some reason our wholesalers have not been able to supply us with stock, and our last few plants have been held back from sale to be grown on and divided.

Sometimes plants behave differently in pots in the plant centre to how they would perform in the garden.  This can be a useful thing to point out to people.  Rudbeckia subtomentosa 'Henry Eilers' with its beautiful soft yellow, quilled petals with spoon shaped tips has finished and gone in the confines of a black plastic 2 litre pot.  I chopped the shabby brown remains down myself on Monday.  In the open ground it is still blooming cheerfully.  There aren't any buds left to open, but most of the flowers are still good, and since it's been doing that throughout September and October to date I think that counts as interest in the autumn garden.  Producing the chopped-down pot with one hand, and the spray of flowers from the garden with the other, illustrated the point.

Talking about autumn leaves from live plants is always faintly nerve-wracking, in case I've chosen specimens that are too close to leaf drop, and the ride in the car finishes them off.  I haven't yet opened the boot to find nothing but bare stems surrounded by a carpet of fallen leaves, but it remains a worrying possibility.  The petals of the Japanese anemone that I took with me to a talk in August did that, though luckily the pot had a coloured label with a picture of the flower on it.

Autumn fruit was faintly tricky tonight, because it has been such an awful year for some species.  The apple season was dire.  I can't fit an entire apple tree in the car, so crab apples always have to be illustrated with twigs from home, but as I held up a cluster of 'Red Sentinel' to describe its many virtues I did tell the audience that the sample in front of them represented approximately twenty-five percent of this year's crop.  The plant centre seemed to be out of holly or pyracantha in berry, which was slightly weird, in that the hollies in the garden are laden with berries.  They did have some very nice Callicarpa when I was at work on Monday, but had sold them all by this morning, so that was another sample, a very tiny one because my two bushes are still so little I couldn't bear to cut more than the smallest scrap off.

The talk was held in the village library, the shelves of books being wheeled out of the way so that the room doubled up as a social space.  There was a village hall next door, but that was full of people singing and dancing in what looked like a rehearsal for a show.  It wasn't possible to park at all close to the entrance to the library, but people were helpful about ferrying plants in and out, so that didn't take too long.  I didn't sell many, though.  Although I have no immediate financial incentive to do so, I'd rather I did sell more, since it reassures me that I must have made them sound interesting.  But the club organiser did ask me for a full list of talks, which suggested she might want me back, unless she were being phenomenally kind and tactful.  Somebody wanted to know whether if he hard pruned a Skimmia that had outgrown its allotted space it would regenerate, and I was bound to admit that I didn't know, but promised to find out and let him know.  If people ask me sensible gardening questions to which I haven't the faintest idea of the answer I do generally try to discover afterwards, if I remember what the question was.