in the conservatory

The first Hedychium gardnerianum flower has come out in the conservatory.  I smelt it as soon as I went in there to do the watering, before I even saw it.  They are very beautiful flowers, spikes of soft yellow trumpets with orange protruding stamens.  Until Google come up with Google Smell you will just have to take my word about the scent.  H. gardnerianum is a good value pot plant, flowering over quite a long period.  I also have 'Tara', which has lovely spikes in a mellow shade of orange, that sadly don't last for very long, and have been and gone by now.  Both of these make large plants, with leaf spikes up to 2m tall, which have a tendency to lean out from the clump, so an established plant, which will happily fill a 45cm pot, needs a fair allocation of floorspace.  They grow from spreading rhizomes, like a bearded iris, and when they get to the edge of the pot you can saw them up into smaller lumps and start again.

Also flowering is the Correa, or Australian fuchsia.  The flowers are pendant and bell-shaped, hence the common name, although the shrub doesn't really look anything like a fuchsia.  Mine is the variety 'Peachy Cream', which has yellow and pink flowers, no scent.  The leaves are evergreen, small and rounded, and slightly prone to insect attack leading to sooty mould, which it is impossible to wash off the individual tiny leaves as you could with something bigger.  I've tried Correa in the ground, and lost them, and nowadays stick to growing this one under cover.  They make rapid growth, are quite amenable to being griven a trim to keep them within their allotted space, and apart from the slight insect problem seem to make good long-term subjects for pots.

The first of my Camellia sasanqua has just finished its second flower.  This is the variety 'Plantation Pink', which by coincidence is the one photographed in Noel Kingsbury's article on how to grow them.  Presumably that means it is a relatively common one.  C. sasanqua are earlier to flower than the more familiar C. japonica and C. x williamsii, and in my experience not as easy to grow.  They are said to be relatively tender, and to require more sunlight than other camellia species, so I thought they sounded like ideal candidates for a west-facing conservatory, but they also seem to be much pickier about the watering regime.  Too much or too little and the leaves go brown at the tip end, and the buds mummify on the plant.  For several years they suffered from being grouped together out of the way in a corner for the long months when they were not in bloom, so now each has its own space, near the window at the sunnier end of the room, so that I can see properly how wet they are, and only water when needed but without letting them dry out.  The crop of buds is looking promising so far.  They make rather lanky plants, and I might follow Noel Kinsgsbury's advice and give them a trim after flowering.

Up the back wall the Plumbago auriculata is producing its sky-blue flowers, which are very pretty, and make me forgive the fact that I know that later the leaves will go brown without falling from the plant, and I will have to pick them off.  On the other side of the lead water spout (electric pump still trickling away, so that's another polar bear doomed) is the climbing Fuchsia 'Lady Boothby'.  This was a present from a friend who had bought about nine in a newpaper readers' offer, which was several more than he required for his own purposes.  Poor 'Lady Boothby' was left outside during the winter of 2009-10, and I thought she had perished.  A frail shoot appeared, but she spend all of last year recovering her strength, and I decided that she had better live inside.  She has large, red and purple typical fuchsia flowers, similar to classic varieties like 'Mrs Popple', and is quite a climber.  Her topmost tip in the conservatory must be approaching 3m, if not there.

Tropaeolum 'Ken Aslet' has not flowered at all.  This is a complete mystery to me.  I did ask the manager at work, but he said it was a mystery to him too.  Maybe it needs a bigger pot.  The tuber was only about the size of a conker, so a huge pot seemed silly.  Maybe it wants seaweed, or tomato food, or to be in stronger light?  Who knows?  However, a Hoya that another friend gave me, who rooted it from a plant that belonged to her grandmother, has suddenly gone a darker shade of green and is looking more decidedly alive, having made some new leaves.  It has been desperately, awfully slow to make roots, and at one point I thought I'd killed it.  I did kill my white flowered Begonia evansiana (much less usual than the pink) but it cropped up again this years as a squatter in a pot of Cautleya (a miniature ginger lily relative), so it must have managed to make a few bulbils on its stems last year.  I peered hopefully at this year's leaf axils in search of baby plantlets, but there are none properly developed yet.  It's lucky I didn't weed them out, as the pink flowered form spreads itself so generously it could almost be a weed.

I like the conservatory very much.  Having a proper garden room, with lights and electric plugs, that doesn't leak or rattle or let the wind howl through it and can be kept frost-free in winter, that I am allowed to fill with plants, gives me the same buzz that owning a really, really good luxury car might give a petrol-head.

one step forward, one step back

The council giveth and the council taketh away.  After my relief that they were finally doing something about the potholes, I discovered this morning when I went to the dump (aka waste recycling centre aka civic amenity site) that the council propose closing it as part of their cost saving drive.  This is a dismal prospect.  It is the closest dump to my house, and always busy.  If it closes I'll have to drive further to get to one of the others, and given local complaints and warnings about queues and traffic jams at the other sites, getting rid of horsetail, creeping sorrel, unwanted seed heads etc is going to be a lot more trouble than at present.  Probably quite a few people won't want to go to the extra trouble, and flytipping will increase.

It is a tough one, and I don't know what they should cut instead.  Obviously I ought to think that libraries are more important than rubbish dumps, except that I use the dump weekly in the growing season, whereas I haven't used a library, except to ask them to put up concert posters, for eight years.  I'm left hoping they could maybe rationalise some of their property and office costs, but don't have the enthusiasm to trawl through the council accounts to see what seemingly unecessary expenditure lurks within.  Council fact-finding missions or something.

Looking at the local paper online I saw that a couple from Harwich were killed on one of the junctions off the A120, just the day after I grumbled here about how dangerous the turnings were.  On the same day a fatal crash on the A12 at the Essex-Suffolk border killed another two people, injured two more, one severely, and caused a traffic jam that backed up to the outskirts of Ipswich plus queues on other local roads as motorists tried to avoid the A12.  It is a terrible road.  Something should be done, if only dropping the speed limit to 50mph on that stretch to try and reduce the number of cars that fly off it.  The human consequences are tragic, and traffic chaos through the area certainly doesn't do my place of work any good.

I swept and tidied the conservatory yesterday morning, pruned and weeded and fed the plants, and washed out the filter of the pump that fed the water spout on the back wall.  I was quite proud of myself as I worked out from first principles that to test whether the filter was the cause of the thing running at a mere trickle I should immerse the pump without the filter in a bucket of clean water, and even more proud when I got the whole thing to work properly.  It has been switched off for months to save electricity, but I got exasperated by the penny pinching, and the knowledge that compared to the carbon output of China this piece of self-denial was not helping the planet in any meaningful way.  Ten minutes after switching the pump back on, the main trip switch on the fuse box clunked to Off.

My initial guilty assumption was that it must have been switching on my pump what done it.  I was out after lunch, but returned to find the Systems Administrator hot and demoralised, having spent the entire afternoon trying and failing to work out what had gone wrong.  Something had happened in the circuit that supported half the downstairs plugs, but the origin of the trouble was a mystery.  The only consoling thought was that the S.A. had remembered to plug the freezer into a socket that still worked, so we didn't have to contend with a mountain of defrosted soft fruit and apple puree.  I am very attached to my stores of home-grown fruit, what with all the work that went into picking and prepping it.

Today an electrician arrived at lunchtime, who seems to have identified the problem, which was not anything the S.A. could ever have guessed.  Something had caused a short circuit in a wire that was left over from the days when the house took its water from a well and so had an electric well pump.  The wire was no longer used for anything, so far as the electrician could see, but was simply there, like an appendix.  Disconnecting the faulty wire from the rest of the wiring ought to do the trick.  The electrician was very cheerful, and liked cats, as well as turning up within four hours of my phone call to the firm that rewired the house for us when we moved in, so he was a hit all round.  The way they work out the loscation of the short circuit is very clever.  After switching the whole circuit off at the fuse box, you send an electrical signal up each bit of cable.  If it can short circuit, that is cross from one wire to the other, a signal pings back to the testing device.  No return signal, no short circuit.  Apparently garages are a frequent location for faults, what with the damp and the cold, but the good news was that the wiring in ours still looked fine.  And the fuse box, while it couldn't be fitted nowadays in a new-build or rewiring project, is perfectly safe, and still legal in existing installations.

My pump was thus exonerated, and the whole wiring debacle not nearly as bad as it could have been.  But I'm annoyed about the dump.

picky starlings, a tidy conservatory, and a drought

I'm relieved to see that Blogspot have found my two missing postings.  I didn't think they could really have mislaid them permanently, although if they had I wouldn't have had strong grounds for complaint, given that they host Cardunculus entirely free and gratis.  The Systems Administrator explained that this was because the marginal cost of hosting extra blogs was practically zero, and a proportion of them would turn out to be commercial and bring in advertising revenue.

The starlings are raising their babies successfully so far in the roof at the front of the house.  I can hear them squeaking for food.  However, they have completely ignored the three purpose-built starling boxes that we put up for them at the end of the house, when we blocked the hole in the soffit board by our bedroom.  Starling nest boxes are very deep, with the hole high up in the box, and look perfectly acceptable to me, but then I am not a starling.  Maybe they don't like being on a north facing wall, but I would have thought the fifteen centimetre deep space in our west facing roof was liable to get fatally hot in warm weather.  There was one July, around the time of the Hampton Court flower show, when they were on their second brood and the squeaking stopped very abruptly, with no sign of the young family going for formation flying lessons around the garden, as usually happens.  Anyway, they know their own business best, and we know ours, and they can't live over the bedroom, due to noise nuisance.

I am on the home straight tidying the conservatory.  Pulling dead leaves and cobwebs out of the agaves I sustained minor flesh wounds for my trouble.  The leaves of agaves are very fibrous, whereas aloes aren't, hence you can keep Aloe vera on your kitchen window sill and break a leaf off to dab on yourself should you burn yourself while cooking.  A friend swears by it, though I am of the five minutes under a cold tap school of thought.  I dislike washing the conservatory glass so much, it reminds me why I have lived in this house for nearly eighteen years and still not yet washed most of the windows, ever.  The conservatory is beginning to look good though, with a proper circulation route through it, and it is possible to sit down without plants jostling in our ears.

I didn't water the quince tree enough, and it has dropped its small fruit, as it did last year.  I don't think I have it in a good spot.  The cherries are still on the tree, and I gave that a soaking.  The five day weather forecast for Colchester, that was for heavy overnight rain and two days of light rain, now shows no rain at all.  The farmers are irrigating at all hours.  I remember learning at Writtle that overhead irrigation in the middle of the day if it was sunny and windy was incredibly wasteful of water, because a high proportion of it would evaporate before it soaked into the ground.  Received gardening wisdom is to avoid watering when it is sunny to avoid sun scorch.  The farmers are just chucking on water, 24/7.

still scrubbing

Washing the conservatory windows and floor is taking an extremely long time.  I looked at some patio cleaner for the floor, but when I read on the bottle that it contained strong disinfectant, and that I should wear gloves while applying it, and exclude pets until dry, and not get it directly on the leaves of plants, I left it where it was.  Instead the floor is getting a scrub with a stiff brush, and hot water with a tiny squeeze of Ecover washing-up liquid.  The conservatory faces west, and I have a dark suspicion that when we sit in there, looking at the sunset, the smears on the windows are going to show up like anything.  I think the answer will be to take a deep gulp of gin and tonic and steadfastedly ignore them.  I am sure nice people do not notice such things, as my father says.  He attributes the saying to George Bernard Shaw.  I can't find it in the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, but it sounds as though it could be from The Chocolate Soldier.

The roots of the poor Strelitzia were revolting, like giant tangled intestines.  It was lucky that Radio 4 were doing one of the early Father Brown stories as the afternoon play, which cheered me up.  The adaptation was very true to the original, keeping a lot of the dialogue as written.  I read all the Father Brown books rather a large number of times as a teenager, and The Man Who was Thursday, and retain a great fondness for Chesterton.

In the front garden the thrift and sea kale in the turning circle are blooming splendidly.  I planted one piece of Crambe maritima, and over the years it has either run by the root or seeded itself to form a good colony.  The new plants have all been close to the original one, with no outliers, so if it has spread by seeding then the seed dispersal mechanism isn't up to much.  The emerging leaves are wonderfully crinkly and purple tinged, and the flowers are clouds of tiny white stars.  They are carried only about 45cm above the ground, so in a conventional border it is one for the front.  I think people sometimes confuse it with Crambe cordifolia, and expect it to be taller.  It grew in Derek Jarman's garden at Dungeness, and he wrote that after violent storms, when the shingle had shifted, the exposted roots of the sea kale were at least twenty feet long.  It is an excellent plant for a dry site on light soil.  The thrift forms tussocks of dark green linear leaves, and is now carrying its pompom flowers in pink and white.  The old tussocks are apt to go brown and die in time, but it keeps going by seeding.

Also putting up a reasonable show is the sea campion, Silene maritima.  I raised it from seed, and it was slow to get going, to the point where I wondered if it disliked acid soil, but this year it is looking far happier and flowering well.  The flowers are single, with a typical campion style full calyx, and the leaves are mat-forming and silvery.  I have just seen on the Plantlife website that it should never be picked, for fear of tempting death.  I planted a few seed raised sea peas at the same time, but annoyingly the only one that is doing well is right at the edge of the turning circle, where it is liable to get run over by passing delivery vans.  If it manages to flower at all then maybe it will seed itself about, as the everlasting pea in the back garden is only too happy to do.  Its Latin name is Lathyrus japonicus ssp. maritimus, and it is not native to Britain, though it is found on shingle beaches here, especially on the east and south coasts.  I have seen it growing on the beach at Aldeburgh, and according to Wikipedia the seeds can remain viable while floating in the sea for up to five years.

Some of the dahlias that were left in the ground over the winter are shooting, much to my astonishment.  I had assumed that the winter had killed them all.  Now I know that at least some are alive, I am watering their bed, and will rig up some string to deter the chickens from dust bathing in it, and put out a very few slug pellets.  I use almost no pellets in the garden, in deference to the wildlife, but the new leaves of dahlias are peculiarly susceptible.  It will be interesting to see which varieties have come through.  In general the yellows and oranges seem more robust and vigorous than the dark reds.

reorganising the conservatory

I've been clearing out the conservatory.  This is a big clear-out.  Most of the pots that are small enough to lift are now spread out across the lawn, and some things that were dead or had become hideously ugly have found their way to the compost heap.  It took a long time to disentangle the Berberidopsis corallina from the Trachelospermum jasminoides on the back wall.  They are both going to have to go outside, and take their chances with the cold weather, since inside the conservatory they are forever getting covered in sooty mould following attack by scale insects and mealy bugs, and are not happy plants.  I've tried biological control, introducing predators, which was expensive and didn't really work, and Provado systemic insecticide, which was equally costly and ineffectual, plus I don't like using it in large quantities.  I have to breathe that air.  When the controls failed I spent ages up a ladder with water running down my sleeves, washing sooty mould off individual leaves.  It doesn't wipe off, by the way, but needs a good scrub with a nail brush.  Life is too short for such performances.  Outside I'm pretty confident that the birds, ladybirds, hover flies and so on will between them keep the pests under control.

The Berberidopsis, or coral vine, is an evergreen climber of dubious hardiness from Chile.  Mine has made plenty of lanky growth, but produced very few of the pendant red flowers for which I planted it.  The leaves would be quite attractive, if they weren't covered in black sticky gunk, but the flowers are the chief point of the plant.  It likes sandy, open, preferably acid soil, which I have provided, and semi-shade, which it will get below the veranda.  It also likes it moist, which it won't be, but I'm reckoning on watering it when I water the nearby pots.  It is a twiner rather than a clinger, so had to be tied to the trellis and existing climbers with string, where it is hanging looking utterly miserable.  I'll have to see if it takes, but it wasn't doing any good where it was.

The Trachelospermum, which I have never entirely forgiven for being the source of the mealy bug infestation, though that is quite irrational, has made a big, substantial plant.  At the moment it is making new leaves and looks almost handsome, but I know another bout of sooty mould is only a scale insect's dribble away.  It has shed a significant portion of its leaves more than once under insect attack, and should be happier outside.  It would be OK in a normal Essex winter, though I'm not sure about the last two.  The flower buds are forming now, and the flowers when they open are white and strongly and deliciously scented.  Planting it below the veranda I hope that the smell will drift up and in through the open door to the sitting room.  At any rate we will appreciate it on the veranda.

My task for tomorrow will be to manouvre two jasmines that have grown into each other across the floor and on to the back wall.  They are currently by one of the glass sides, which means the glass is impossible to clean.  Conservatory glass does tend to go green with algae, given the level of humidity and (in my case) low winter temperatures, so I have decided that as I rearrange the plants there is going to be nothing in front of the windows that can't be moved so that they can be washed.

Another task will be to finish removing a Strelizia regina, destination the compost heap.  I grew it from a seed, and was pleased and excited when it finally flowered.  As it kept growing it regularly pushed itself out of its pot on a great coiled mat of roots, until the day came when I couldn't find an even bigger pot to move it up into.  The compost by that stage was standing 15cm above the rim of the pot, so watering was becoming impossible.  I asked advice from the South African stand at Chelsea, and was told that Strelitzia don't like being root pruned.  In desperation I bought a very large black plastic tub, which was the only thing I could find with sufficient depth.  It was a lot wider than the old pot, and I wondered as I moved the plant if this was going to work.  It didn't.  The Strelitzia seemed to detest having that much surplus compost around it, and I never got the hang of the watering regime.  One by one the leaves curled in on themselves and died, and by now the roots have largely rotted.  Although I was attached to it because of raising from seed, and the flowers were exotic, I'm not heartbroken to see it go.  It had begun to take up a large amount of space for the quantity of flowers, and while I could get another young plant at The Clacton Garden Centre, I'm not going to.  I am about half way through excavating the old compost, and haven't found a single vine weevil grub, so I should say they don't seem to go for Strelitzia.

A more general point on watering is that it seems essential, in conservatory or greenhouse, to have each pot where you can see into it clearly to judge how dry or damp it is, and reach it, to touch the surface of the compost and if necessary dig your finger in.  Things that end up sitting too wet, or hopelessly dry, tend to be the ones at the back out of clear sight, both at home and at work.

I don't want to lift the largest pots, or physically can't, so the pace of the great reorganisation is limited by the need to keep shuffling them and their contents around the floor.  I took the Lloyd Loom chairs out, but decided not to risk it with the table, which has a glass top.  I was going to put the wirework plant rack outside, bought years ago in an OKA sale, but when I realised that the tiers slotted into each other and were maddeningly difficult to line up correctly once unslotted, I decided that could stay inside and shuffle around as well.  I need a parting of the red sea so that the jasmines can slide diagonally from front left to back right,  and if I get the redundant giant black pot out, the Phoenix canariensis can move sideways, after I've washed the window.  I'm sure it will all fall into place, if I just keep on going round in circles.

making plans for the conservatory

In the conservatory the Eriobotrya 'Coppertone' is flowering.  This is an evergreen of uncertain parentage, which forms a shrub or small tree, and at this time of the year has strongly scented, pink flowers.  The new foliage that follows is an attractive shade of copper.  We started stocking them at work four or five years ago, and I was enchanted by them, and amazed that our customers didn't buy all that we had at once.  They were semi-large standards and quite expensive, which may have been one reason, and also dubiously hardy, which is a consideration when you are thinking of spending that much on a plant.  I asked for one as a birthday or Christmas present, and my records show that we got ours in April 2007, which is slightly confusing as that's not when my birthday is.  As we've had it for four years I can report that it makes a good long-term subject for a container.  It is now in a 50cm pot, and I have pruned it a few times to keep it within bounds.  It suffers a bit from caterpillars that roll up its leaves, but appears immune to red spider mite, and the mealy bugs that came in on another large specimen.  I can also vouch from personal experience that if you let it get dry and it wilts (a good gardener wouldn't, but these things happen) it will recover, unlike some evergreens like Callistemon which will simply die.

The conservatory needs a good sort out.  I had a moment of epiphany a day or two back when I realised that I should get rid of the Acacia longifolia.  This species has willow-like leaves, which are not so pretty as A. dealbata, the classic mimosa, and it has grown too tall for the available space and is trained across the ceiling, and half-blocking the doorway.  I have been tidying out the dead leaves and twigs for the past couple of seasons, but the plant, while nice in its youth, has become old and ugly.  This is sad, and a fate that awaits many of us, but good gardens and a ruthless attitude to individual plants often go hand in hand.  I am not so ruthless as I should be.

Addendum  The editors of The Journal of Animal Ethics have decreed that it is demeaning to animals to term them pets, and that we should call them Companion Animals and ourselves Human Carers.  Vets seem to use the term companion animal anyway, but I draw the line at becoming a Carer to the cats.  It sounds too unspeakably dreary.  A more appropriate word would be Servant.