agapanthus in pots

Agapanthus are great garden flowers, their clusters of tubular blue (or occasionally white) flowers on long stems heralding high summer.  They grow happily in the gravel around the formal pond, seeding themselves with abandon, including into the gaps between the paving slabs, at which point I have to grub them out, or resort to glyphosate.  The plants in the gravel are all hardy, despite originating from South Africa.  I don't know how much cold it would take to kill them, but given extremely sharp drainage they came through the recent long, cold winters and the long wet winter unscathed, without my mulching them or doing anything at all.  The hardier agapanthus are generally deciduous, while if you are faced with an array of plants of unknown hardiness, the rule of thumb is that those with narrow leaves are tougher than the ones with big, wide, fat leaves.  The latter are probably evergreen, given the chance, but of course if you plant them outside you won't know that because the first frost will turn their leaves to mush.

I also grow them in pots, but not so many as I did.  Originally I put special named forms in containers, so that I could keep them labelled and put them in the greenhouse for safety in the winter, but the greenhouse got so full it was bursting at the seams, while the plants in the ground were doing perfectly well without winter protection.  In fact, they were flowering better than the ones in pots.  So last year I planted all of them out except the tender, wide leaved 'Queen Mum', which carries huge balls of pale greyish blue flowers, deeper blue at the base, and three pots of something labelled Agapanthus africanus, though I'm not one hundred per cent convinced about that.  According to Wikipedia most plants sold as A. africanus are actually something else, and I'm no expert on agapanthus species and varieties.  This one started off planted in the gravel, where the winter cold turned its leaves to mush each year, and was not thriving under the regime, so I potted it up.  Since then it has been split.

Books and magazine articles will tell you that agapanthus flower better if pot bound.  This may be true up to a point, but what the magazines don't always make clear is that unless they are well fed and watered they won't flower at all, or will bloom only sparingly.  I thought I was treating my potted collection pretty well, but with hindsight a watering regime that suited the geraniums may have been inadequate for the agapanthus, and I wasn't assiduous about feeding them.  Something about life in a pot must have caused 'Loch Hope' and its named deciduous companions to perform worse than the self sown mongrels in the ground, while a couple of years ago I got no flowers at all from Agapanthus africanus.

Three large pots that couldn't produce a decent display of flowers in summer certainly didn't justify valuable greenhouse space in the winter, or the sheer physical effort of moving the pots twice a year.  With great difficulty I repotted them, the difficulty being partly of my making and partly down to the nature of agapanthus.  My error was to have used whatever largish pots came to hand the previous time I potted them, without any thought as to how I was going to get the plants out again.  They were rather nice pots, Italian imports rather than hand thrown at Whichford, but graceful shapes in a subfusc shade of pale terracotta.  And they curved inwards at the top, not by a huge margin, but by an inch or so all round compared to the fattest part of the pot.

There were two choices, and two only, the quick route, which was to sacrifice the pots and smash them off with a lump hammer, and the thrifty method, which was to cut the edges off the rootballs so that they would slide free.  I opted for the latter, being a frugal gardener and more attached at that moment to the pots than the non-doing agapanthus.  It took a great deal of patient sawing with a bread knife.  Really a very great deal of sawing, and since then I sometimes think when I cut bread with the knife that it is not so sharp as it used to be.  Eventually I was able to extract the plants, looking rather battered, but it was such a physical effort that I only repotted two of the three, replanting them in large, plain pots in the traditional flower flower pot shape, sides sloping away from the base like a cone with the point chopped off, and with a very smooth interior finish.

That's the other thing about agapanthus.  They make a great quantity of thick, fleshy, white roots, once they get going, which circle round and round inside a pot, and seem to stick to the surface with peculiar tenacity.  They don't like shaking loose even from a smooth sided, flared pot, once they are well and truly pot bound, and if you've used a pot with interior ridges along the lines of the vaguely hand thrown aesthetic that's in vogue in garden centres at the moment, then good luck to you ever separating pot and plant with both in roughly one piece.  Whatever you use I wouldn't choose anything too valuable, in case the day comes when you have to decide between plant and pot and you'd rather save the plant.

Last year the Agapanthus africanus in pots made yet another pathetic contribution to summer in the Italian garden, sending up about one flower spike between the three of them.  This year I have been feeding them tomato food when I do the geraniums, and they may even have had a sprinkling of blood, fish and bone when they came out of the greenhouse.  The two repotted plants have sprung back to life, now they've had time to settle in their pots, and are sending up lots of promising buds on long stalks.  The third plant is still doing zippo, and comparing it to the other two I can see that its leaves are smaller.  The trouble is, as its roots grew it had pushed itself upwards in the pot to the point where the compost was slightly proud of the sides, making it difficult to water, let alone feed.

I had to make a special trip to two garden centres to find a suitable pot for it.  The existing pot was another nice Italian one with the mouth critically narrower than the maximum diameter of the pot, and it took another mammoth session of sawing with an old carving knife ( while being careful not to stab myself in the shin), scraping with the sinister curved hook normally used for clearing between paving slabs, and picking handfuls of fat white roots off the rootball to get it out.  It had made masses of new roots, to the point where it was well and truly pot bound, but it wasn't showing any signs of flowering.  I can see why you wouldn't want to move agapanthus into an overly large pot, as their fleshy roots look as though they'd rot in wet compost in no time, given half a chance, but they certainly don't respond well to being so congested in their pots that food and water run straight off the top.