I spent a quiet morning in the conservatory, watering, sweeping, pruning, and in one case potting. I am very fond of the conservatory, indeed, if I were having my own Grand Designs house built I would wrap it around a two storey atrium filled with plants. Our actual conservatory is not nearly so large or elaborate, an almost square aluminium framed lean-to rising to something under four metres at the back, but it is great fun for growing plants in, which is how I use it. There are two rattan chairs (with slightly mould stained cushions) and a small table where we can sit to drink tea, but that's it, everything else gets watered regularly. No rugs, throws, carpet, sofa, tablecloth or any of the other domestic paraphernalia that properly belong in a sitting room or a sun room.
The ginger lilies have finished flowering and I deadheaded them. The foliage was mostly looking pretty smart, suggesting I managed to water them enough this summer. Hedychium throw up new shoots in the spring, great fleshy stems bearing leaves at intervals along their entire length, then one flower spike develops at the tip of each stem. If allowed to get too dry at the root the edges of the leaves turn pale brown and crispy and look horrid. If protected from frost the stems will last until next year, and I like to keep them over the winter if possible since the leaves help feed the plant, only cutting them down as the new shoots start to appear, but it's a hard call if they have gone tatty. This year they are all set to provide a lush jungle background for a few more months. Their other habit, which I have noticed in grand glasshouses open to the public, is to sent their stems strongly sideways towards the light, so that a plant that should have been a couple of metres tall ends up almost that far across. I have seen ginger lily stems growing in a glasshouse border propped up and penned back with canes to keep them off the path, but that isn't an option growing them in pots. I solved the problem by turning a couple of the worst offending pots around so that the leaves rested against the window.
I potted on the Hardenbergia violacea. I will have to be careful not to over water it through the winter, but autumn is the traditional time for planting shrubs out in the ground, and I don't see why it shouldn't get on with making new roots in its pot, since it had filled the old one. I was partly looking in its pot to check for any signs of vine weevil and root aphid, but found neither. Hardenbergia is a twining climber with delicate stems and purple flowers in April. I got mine at an RHS London show, and it is not as rampant as I should like, with an unnerving habit of allowing entire stems to die off, but it is growing. Jasmines do the same dead stem trick.
One of the ginger lilies had split its pot, or rather pushed out a segment that had previously been glued back in place. The only spare pot I could find was the same size, and I chopped a piece off the rhizome to make it fit its replacement quarters. Ginger lilies behave superficially like bearded iris, sending out fresh growth and new shoots at one end of the rhizome while the other remains as an inert lump. Unlike bearded iris the inertia is only temporary. If you chop off the old and apparently no longer sprouting sections of rhizome in the course of repotting the plant, and bury them in the compost heap as I did, then a few months or a year or two down the line you will find them happily sprouting anew. If you are like me you then feel compelled to pot them, when they have tried so hard to live. This is one reason why I have slightly more ginger lilies in the conservatory than there is comfortably room for, and two more in the greenhouse.
I prodded the compost around climbing fuchsia 'Lady Boothby' and it was alarmingly soft. Further investigation revealed that 'Lady Boothby' did not have nearly so many roots as she should have done. A fuchsia that's been in the same pot for several years is normally bursting with roots. I did not find any vine weevil grubs, on the other hand I could not tip 'Lady Boothby' out of the pot because she was three metres tall and tied to the wall in several places. Have I over watered her? Are there vine weevils further down and out of sight? How long does a fuchsia live in a pot? 'Lady Boothby' was a present from a former colleague who ordered a set of plants from a newspaper reader offer in a fit of enthusiasm before realizing he only really needed one, and that was years ago, maybe a decade or even more. I took four cuttings as an attempted insurance policy while suspecting that mid October was too late in the season, even with a heated propagator.
The compost from the fallen Impatiens went in the council brown bin, vine weevil grubs and all. I hope the cuttings I took from that strike, although if they don't at least I can buy a new plant from Dibleys next year. Begonia luxurians, which was so lovely last year and the year before with its huge exotic many fingered leaves, was a sad object this year, and I can't work out why it failed to thrive, so perhaps one way and another a Dibleys order is calling.
I accidentally broke a piece off the regal pelargonium 'Joy' so chopped that up and made it into cuttings. They might root. Zonals and scented leaf forms are generally very obliging, but I haven't tried propagating 'Joy' before. She is very charming, with frilly, white centred flowers in a startling shade of pink. My original plant was bought on a visit to Mapperton House in Dorset, a remote Jacobean manor with a splendid and totally unexpected Italianate garden, whose disintegrating orangery was being rescued just in the nick of time by the fees for featuring in the film version of Far From the Madding Crowd. 'Joy' Mark I promptly got an attack of aphid, then seemed disillusioned by life in the greenhouse in her first winter, and quietly died, but I was able to source a replacement from Fibrex Nurseries. 'Joy' Mark II lives in the sunniest corner of the conservatory near the door, so fresh air blows over her all summer, and is happy so far. I have never done particularly well keeping regal pelargoniums going in the past.
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