the plant centre is getting busier

Things are starting to get busier at the plant centre.  People are beginning to think about replacing the things in their gardens that have died over the winter, and favourite questions are coming up like ideas for quick growing evergreens to screen views to/from the neighbours' windows (not as easy as you'd think).  There was a spectacularly scorched piece of sweet bay (yes, it was almost certainly due to cold, no, I wouldn't cut it back quite yet in case we have another cold spell.  It's only the first half of February).  A new one, which I didn't know the answer to, was the identity of some wriggly grubs in a jam jar that a chap had found in his homemade compost.  He wanted to know, not unreasonably, if he could use the compost or if they would eat living as well as dead plant material.  I offered to show them to the manager on Monday, which he was very happy about, except that he wanted his jam jar back, and I had to find something else to put them in (an empty milk bottle but I'm sure the dairy company will wash it thoroughly).  It would have been an even better day if we hadn't realised, at 5.00pm when it was time to go home, that the paraffin heater needed filling.  Jerome K Jerome had the measure of paraffin when he said that it started at one end of the boat, and moved down the boat until everything smelt of paraffin.  The same is true when you get it on your trousers.

There are some nice hellebores about.  'Walberton's Rosemary' is a recent introduction with largish single pink flowers held upright so that you can look into their faces.  I bought one last year, which was the first year we'd stocked it, and am interested to see if it is long-lived with me.  The H. orientalis forms seem very perennial here, but some of the glamorous recent hybrids have not lasted so well.

starting to count the winter losses

I'm beginning to count the winter's casualties, and fear there will be quite a few.  It was colder for longer last December than in the previous winter, and some things that made it through 2009-10, albeit looking a bit burnt by the cold, are now looking dead, like my Acacia pravissima.  I don't like to assume the worst too early, as plants can have amazing powers of regeneration, but I'm concerned that things like Callistemon that were cut to the ground the previous year and had begun to reshoot from the roots won't have the energy to repeat that trick a second time.  Even so I won't rush to dig them out, just in case.

I have no hope at all that the crisped up leafless remains of my rosemary 'Severn Sea' are still alive.  It only went in last year.  I chose that variety because the flowers are a very beautiful shade of blue, and it is supposed to flower over a very long season, and I wanted a low growing one.  Rosemary can be short lived as shrubs go, but the prostrate ones tend to last for longer than the upright growers because the branches root where they touch the ground, and the plant renews itself that way.

I try to be philosophical about losses in general, on the grounds that these things happen, it is interesting to see how plants behave and what succumbs or surprises you by surviving, and the gaps created do offer opportunities to try new things.  But it is galling to lose a lot two years in a row.  Partly it is the expense of replacing plants, and the extra work created by having to clear away the remains and replant.  Plus weeds love bare soil, and established plants act as weed suppressants.  Each lost plant, or failed bit of 2010 planting that has to be done again, represents another bit of ground that will have to be kept weed free this year, when I had hoped that it would be starting to look after itself.  I might need to take a slightly more hawkish view about what can be regarded as hardy, and how much doubtfully hardy stuff I can cope with.  I saw a wonderful rose at Wyken Hall a couple of years ago and have been wondering where I could fit one in.  Maybe in the space previously occupied by Acacia pravissima?