poppies with commitment issues

The success of my third attempt to establish the California tree poppy Romneya coulteri in the back garden still seems to be hanging in the balance.  There is a lusty specimen at the Chatto Gardens, in the dry garden just opposite the cafe, and I feel that it ought to be quite happy in the light soil where I'm trying to persuade it to grow, if it would only just give it a try.  A well-grown Romneya is a thing of beauty, with stems around chest height covered in grey leaves, and large, single, white, poppy-like flowers with golden stamens.  Once established it is supposed to run about, but the books all admit that it is notoriously difficult to establish.  Mine is not running, so much as cowering on the spot.

I was pleased a while back to discover that it had at least made it through the winter, or rather one stem had, since that was one stem more than I'd seen in the second season of either of my previous plants.  Then the single stem fell off, and I thought that after three failed attempts it might be time to call it a day.  But then yesterday I read in Christopher Lloyd's Garden Flowers that it is best treated as a herb, cutting everything within sight to ground level in early winter, so thought that maybe in that case it might survive losing its only stem in August.  Today, weeding the island bed as I replant it for the third time in as many years (third time lucky?) I found its little cluster of new shoots, next to where I had thoughtfully marked the spot with an iron plant support.  They don't exactly look as though they were bursting with life and enthusiasm, on the other hand they are not dead, yet.  I have been teasing the creeping sorrel out from around it, so I'll give it a top-dressing of mushroom compost and bonemeal and hope that something is happening underground, and that next year it will burst forth.  The great man is less measured in his praise than I am, describing the plant as a thrilling spectacle, carrying abundance of pure white poppies, but I am curbing my enthusiasm in case mine dies again like the others did.

Occasionally I have to remember to curb my enthusiasm for Great Dixter, at least as far as trying to emulate it too far goes, when Lloyd reminds me that the soil there is heavy clay, and I remember that I am mostly dealing with starved sand, and that Dixter has been cultivated as a garden and presumably dosed with regular additions of compost since Edwardian times, whereas our site was an orchard which was probably dosed with nothing except unholy amounts of Simazine.  Also, re-reading Garden Flowers I am forced to admit that at Dixter many areas of planting are changed several times a year, treating plants that I would use as perennials if I could even grow them at all as bedding plants, to be grown on to the point of flowering behind the scenes, installed in the borders to do their bit, and then moved or scrapped straight after flowering.

I have gone so far as to ignore the great master and plant a Phuopsis sylosa, which I saw and liked at Rosemoor, and Chistopher Lloyd dismisses on the basis that it smells of fox.  It doesn't smell that bad to me, but then I don't have a great sense of smell.  Phuopsis, in case you were wondering, is a herbaceous front of the border sort of thing, with thin green leaves and pink flowers.  I raised several from seed, but lost most of the young plants in the greenhouse last winter, so today's was the sole survivor.  We have a few left at work, so I might get a couple more.  Lloyd says that it soon spreads beyond its allotted area, which sounds what I need, a vigorous creeper to fight it out with the creeping sorrel.  Though talking of things that smell of fox, I was weeding around a box plant that was in flower, and that was truly disgusting.  The Dead Queen Anne scrapped (or at least caused to be scrapped,  I don't suppose she dug them up herself) all the box plants at Hampton Court because she disliked the smell.

unexpected inhabitants in the Eryngium

I have been clearing away dead bits from the Eryngium pandanifolium.  This is (when it has not been blasted by snow) a statuesque and imposing evergreen.  I bought it as my 40th birthday present to me, when we visited Great Dixter for the first time on the actual day of the birthday.  I had read Christopher Lloyd's books, most of them many times, starting with his Foliage Plants, which was one of the first gardening books I ever bought in my early twenties.  I loved his style and philosophy, and his accounts of Great Dixter, and the garden in reality proved to be every bit as good as it sounded (things aren't always).  I liked the Eryngium as we walked around the garden, and bought one to take home with me, without having a clear plan where I was going to put it.

It is one of the rosette forming members of the species, with long, strap-shaped, spiny-edged  leaves, which throws up typical Eryngium flowers on long stems.  What I had not grasped, even having seen it growing at Dixter, was how large it was going to get.  I fitted mine into a gap among the roses, congratulating myself that it would introduce some useful architectural bones into a twiggy and formless area.  It did that, but it grew prodigously.  The tuft of leaves reached a good metre tall, and the flower stems twice that, and it divided and spread at the base to form multiple growing points until it was well over a metre wide.  On one side it began it grow into a low box hedge, which became thin and skinny where the Eryngium pressed into it, and frequently too tall because it was such a spiny business reaching through the Eryngium to trim the top.

The box hedge was the saving of it last winter.  Most of the leaves died, and most of the crown as well, but from the side closest to the hedge, where it got a modicum of protection from the cold and snow, new shoots have emerged.  I cleared away the dead leaves, and was starting to remove the dead bits from the crown, while keeping an eye out for signs of life, when I heard a strange fizzing noise.  I puzzled about this for a while, until bumble bees started to emerge from the crown, at which point I retreated hastily.  Bumbles are normally gentle creatures, and I have only been stung once, when I was cutting long grass with shears and cut right over the entrance to their nest in an old mouse burrow, without knowing it was there.  I can testify from personal experience that their stings are extremely painful.  Fortunately this lot showed no desire to chase me across the garden, and after a while I ventured to retrieve my tools and my radio.  I thought I'd better not push my luck any more for one day, and left mulching that bit of the border until another time, but I'll put some Strulch around them and over the remains of the crown at some point.

They will have finished nesting by the autumn, so I can then carry out my plan to lift what is left of the plant, and replace it in its original position further from the box.  I suppose one advantage of doing a lot of cultivation by hand rather than machinery is that you are more likely to get advance warning when you are heading into danger.  There are accounts of people being killed while strimming undergrowth, and hitting a wasps' nest.