I spent part of today tidying the conservatory. Ours is a conservatory in the Victorian sense of the word, a glazed garden room used to grow plants. There are two chairs and a little table, but no soft furnishings except for a couple of modest cushions that came with the chairs, and are by now slightly mildew stained, also lightly covered in cat hair because Our Ginger and Black and White Killer Cat both like to sit in there (though not at the same time). No sofa, no scatter cushions, no chintz table cloth, no rag rugs, practically none of the set dressing beloved of garden magazine photographers. The floor is tiled with utilitarian red terracotta, and there is a central drain for excess water to drain away when I'm watering the many pots. There is an elaborate circular wirework multi-tiered plant support in the middle, bought in a sale, and a small wall fountain. It is so crammed with pots it would be a squeeze for more than two people to sit in there.
We sometimes have tea in the conservatory in the afternoons, though not today because I'd made such a muddle tidying it up. Back in the summer I fitted some white fairy lights around the top of the windows, and was very pleased with myself until the first time I demonstrated the effect to the Systems Administrator, who remarked mildly that I'd used the wrong lights. I was supposed to have used some LEDs bought last year for the Christmas pot of hazel twigs in the study, which were much too long but the only ones left in B&Q by the time we got round to buying them. We'd agreed that I would use those in the conservatory and get a shorter string for next Christmas' twigs. By midsummer my memory of the Christmas lights was fairly hazy, and what I'd actually taken was the non LED set the SA uses for the bannisters. Both are nominally white, but the LEDs cast a bluish light, while the conventional bulbs are a warm yellow and come with a controller with a choice of elaborate sequences, and the SA wanted them back.
The conservatory as built came with a full set of plastic rings on a sliding track, meant for fitting curtains. We have never wanted curtains in there, and while the odd ring has got broken in the course of using them to tie up wayward branches, most are intact. The conservatory is aluminium, and I've never felt comfortable about drilling holes in it to fit hooks for tying in plants the way I would if it were wood. I had fastened up the first set of lights by tying them to the plastic rings with the coated wire fasteners from a packet of sandwich bags, which meant that today I had to go round untying the wires before repeating the exercise with a different set of lights. It turned out that I had not been consistent over whether I twisted the wires around each other clockwise or anticlockwise, and it was not very easy to see what I was doing, peering up in the dim autumn light.
The new lights are actually a better length, reaching around all three of the glazed sides of the room. The rear wall is brick, but had to have its own wall built instead of being tacked on to the back of the house because we are on such a slope. It's a shame in some ways that it isn't en suite to the rest of the house, and it would probably add more value to the property if it were and could be counted as an extra room for marketing purposes, on the other hand it would cut down the light to the study, and it's nice to have the view.
Meanwhile the plants in the conservatory are starting to think that it's autumn. Some of the begonias have defoliated and dropped half their brittle stems. I'm reasonably optimistic that if I can strike the right balance between not letting them sit too wet and not letting them dry out completely then they will shoot again next year, though experience teaches that they are quite late into growth and it's necessary not to panic when by late spring still nothing is happening. The tips of most of the shoots on the Correa have suddenly lost their leaves as well. That is more of a mystery, in fact a complete mystery. I have no good theory why the Correa is going bald from the tips backwards. I trimmed off the bare shoots before they could die and go mouldy, which is no bad thing as it should encourage it to stay bushy, searched for pests but couldn't find any large munching creatures, tut-tutted over some small patches of sooty mould indicating a sap sucker had been at it, and will probably give it a precautionary dose of insecticide when I've finished working in there.
I found a terracotta pot for display purposes for the new Tibouchina urvilleana, as near in size to its existing black plastic pot as possible. I don't want it sitting in lots of unused compost over the winter, on the other hand a bog standard 3 litre black plastic nursery pot is not a thing of beauty, and everything else in there is in clay, except for the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' that needed potting on for its health, and is now in a container so large that if I could ever find a clay one that large it would set me back an amount in three figures. Four figures from the Whichford pottery. And I would not be able to lift either to get them round into the back garden and up into the conservatory. The Eriobotrya was repotted last autumn, and I agonised at the time about whether that was the right thing to do. I can now report that it was a complete success. I tried to direct water on to the original rootball through the winter, until it had had time to root into the new compost, and over the next few months the leaves greened up and the problem of leaf spotting disappeared, there was a healthy flush of new leaves in spring, and the whole canopy thickened. I will never be able to find a larger container than the one it's in now, so if and when it becomes root bound again it will have to be root pruned and repotted in the same tub. Let as hope that is not for a few years.
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