The new season of Suffolk Plant Heritage lectures has started. Living in Essex it would have been logical for me to sign up to the Essex group, but I joined Suffolk because I was scooped up by a couple of energetic members. They have a well organised annual programme, and living so close to the county border it's as easy to drive to Stowupland as Chelmsford. Anyway, I have as many gardening friends and acquaintances north of the border as this side, after a decade of working at the plant centre.
Today's guest speaker was Rosy Hardy of Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants, multiple Chelsea award winner as seen at Chelsea and on TV, talking about autumn flowering perennials. There are some very good plants that flower in September or later, and they need promoting, though probably less to a Plant Heritage audience than the average gardener. The reaction of the friend I visited the Hepworth with to the fact that I'd just been to the Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens was to ask whether there was anything to see at this time of the year (he recently went to the Abbotsbury swannery, but the Systems Administrator's reaction on being told that it had a thousand swans was that when you've seen twenty, you've seen them all).
Rosy Hardy gave exactly the sort of talk that I like, telling us about the growth habit of each plant and its preferences regarding soil, light and moisture. And she told us how to propagate them. Commercial growers have nothing to fear from telling their customers how to make more plants, since a real plant enthusiast will merely use any savings to acquire a new and different plant, while anyone who isn't pretty keen won't bother to try. I love messing around with seeds and cuttings and divisions, and was always amazed when working at the plant centre by how many people who considered themselves keen gardeners seemed happy to buy all their plants, showing no interest in propagation whatsoever.
Rosy Hardy had brought enough pots for sale to cover several large trestle tables but I held off, conscious that I already had a backlog of home grown stock waiting to go out as soon as I can clear a place in the ground. I took copious notes, though, and Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants has a website so if I find I have spaces for things I can always order them later.
Such discipline does not come easily. I am still itching that I should have snapped up the very nice little plants of pink Gaura on sale at the Cressing Temple Barns at two pounds each. My existing ones are doing so well in the gravel, I should rather like some more. I had better try and find out how and if I can propagate from my two clumps (does the pink come true from seed, which is how I raised my original white ones, or will they split?). In general, though, I am an increasing fan of internet shopping for plants. There's no risk of being seduced by how attractive the plant is now, at this minute, in its pot, and there's all the resources of my bookshelves and the worldwide web to check what conditions the thing would like, and if it has any nasty habits I should know about before introducing it to my garden. Of course you have to buy sight unseen, and there's the risk that the nursery could fob you off with something substandard, but I don't believe that reputable growers who have been going for years are going to do that. It isn't a tactic you could deploy very often before word would get round, and your business would collapse.
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