At some point yesterday, when I was not looking, the council's waste contractors came and took away my old, broken green waste bin, and left a new shiny replacement. As I played with the gleaming lid of the new one and began to fill it with weeds from the gravel I felt a little rush of the gratification that comes from a successful encounter with authority. When most news stories about waste collection are tales of woe and strife and missed collections and today a report of an aggressive idiot driving his car at the poor bin men, I was pleased that the whole garden waste bin question had been resolved so easily.
Into the newly weeded gravel I finally planted the two Papaver pilosum subsp. spicatum that have been sitting about in their pots for about a month since I saw them on the Chatto Gardens website while shopping for geraniums, and couldn't resist trying them. It is a perennial species of poppy with orange flowers, which will immediately put some people off. The flowers are carried at intervals up the long flowering stalks in the style of Himalayan blue poppies, rather than singly on individual stems like oriental poppies or the Papaver nudicaule that already grows in the gravel. I saw a plant of P. pilosum growing in somebody else's garden back in the summer and thought it was so pretty I was willing to risk trying a couple at home. I don't attempt to grow blue poppies because the very air is too dry for them in Essex, never mind the soil, but seeing P. pilosum looking perfectly happy in Suffolk gave me some grounds for hope. And ever hopeful, I bought two plants in case they were not self fertile, since if they will grow here I should like them to seed themselves about.
I began to plant my stock of seed raised Limonium caspium 'Dazzling Blue'. The description in the Chiltern Seeds catalogue made it sound as though they might grow in the sandy soil of the turning circle, though the Limonium I've tried in the past have not really thrived. The current batch only made very subdued little plants in their pots, and I am not fantastically optimistic about them, but having got them this far it seems silly not to give them a go in the ground and see how they do.
Periodically I have been startled by the sight on the hall table of what looks like a large, green mangle wurzle wearing a festive decoration tied round its middle. In fact it is my amaryllis bulb. I must remember to pot it tomorrow.
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