It was a damp and a drizzly day, and I set about tidying up the conservatory. It wasn't too bad, but there were some fallen leaves to sweep up, my new Clivia had been sitting in its plastic bag on the hall table ever since the Plant Heritage meeting, and I had reluctantly to admit that the conservatory windows needed washing. I had a colleague once, a fastidious man with very definite ideas about design, who was having his house done up, and I was quite interested in the progress of his conservatory until he mentioned that the carpet was due to arrive. Our conservatory does not have a carpet. It has a tiled floor with a central drain, glass on three sides, a polycarbonate roof that lets a certain amount of light through, and is full of plants. Sometimes too full. There used to be an Acacia by the door for several years that covered anyone using the door with yellow bobbles when it was in flower, followed by the grey remains of its dead flowers for months afterwards. The Systems Administrator used to mutter hostile remarks about the Acacia.
It is currently slightly better organised than that. One of the things I have begun to grasp over the years is the necessity of observing the principle Harold Nicolson attributed to Vita, that of having the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants. Today I evicted a plumbago. The fact that ours was a miserable, skinny specimen was brought home to me months ago, on holiday, when we saw one doing really well (possibly in the conservatory at Hidcote?) and I was forced to contrast its lush, dense foliage and smothering cover of bright blue flowers with my thin, spindly plant and its miserable scattering of blooms. I messed around repotting it, and made vague plans to move it off the back wall so that it would get more light. All in vain and putting off the inevitable. Today I chopped off its lank branches, disentangled them from the neighbouring jasmine, and lugged the truncated pot outside. I felt better as soon as I'd done it.
The jasmine got a hard pruning a while back, and is being slow to respond, but I think I'll give it this summer and see how it does with regular feeding. It is Jasminum mesnyi, a tender (you might get away with outside in a really warm and sheltered garden) scrambler whose large yellow flowers ought to start opening about now. The foliage of mine tends to go rather pale and mottled, and I peer at it suspiciously for signs of red spider mite and try to work out what it is about a slightly shady garden room in north Essex that fails to make it believe it is in its native Vietnam.
Patience with cutting back can work. I have an evergreen clematis, again one of those species on the cusp of tenderness, that has had a chequered conservatory career. It started off at the front in the light, which it liked, but massively outgrew its aluminium tripod despite my efforts to persuade it to twiddle round and round the support, and began to block the view out of the window. I moved it to the back wall to give it more height, but it shot up to the top of the wall and only flowered at the very ends, just under the roof. I guessed the back wall was too dark for its liking. By now I had a thirteen foot plant, bald for most of its height and with a flimsy aluminium tripod embedded in its lower limbs, so I chopped it off at the three foot mark, which left it with no leaves at all, and stuck it in the sunniest corner next to the standard Eriobotrya 'Coppertone', hoping that it might reshoot and twine through the shrub. Nothing happened for months, and I wondered if it was dead, but the truncated stems still looked plump and were green under the bark when I scratched at them with my fingernail. Trying to judge how much and how often to water it was tricky, in the absence of any feedback because there were no leaves. Finally this spring it has begun to throw out new shoots, which I think will look better popping out of its host here and there than thinly spread out against a wall.
The Clivia gave me an anxious moment when I extracted it from its black plastic pot, cutting it free because some of the thick, fleshy roots had gone out through the drainage holes and I didn't want to chop them off. Compost instantly began to fall off the rootball, revealing quite a few dead roots, and I wondered whether I had managed to overwater it during its fortnight's sojourn in the hall. Then I worked out that there were plenty of healthy new roots, and decided that it must be one of those fat-rooted things, like my kitchen orchids and the ginger lilies, that do give up on their oldest roots, and that part of normal hygiene when repotting was to remove them and clean the plant up.
Washing the windows took longer than titivating the plants, but was not so interesting. There are times when I'm gardening and could wish that I were taller or had more upper body strength, but wriggling in among the plants to get access to the windows is one of those tasks that leaves me relieved to be small and flexible. I did make one interesting discovery as I was worming my way up the ladder wedged in between the glass and the Wollemi Pine, and some flattened brown discs fluttered to the ground. I traced their source to one of the higher branches on the Wollemi, and I think they must be seeds. They certainly look like conifer seeds, though larger than anything I've seen drop out of a fir cone before. I collected them carefully and put them in a pot pending further investigation. I have no idea if Wollemi are self-fertile, or the age at which they normally start setting seed, but it would be very gratifying if they were seeds and triply so if any germinated.
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