Buddleja lindleyana

A very striking species and not at all what you might expect a Buddleia to look like.

The rich purple flowers are tubular and have a waxy bloom to them which gives a particularly richly coloured effect and are produced over a long period in summer.
£15

Silene asterias

Silene asterias, originally uploaded by peganum.

A lovely little Bulgarian species unlike any of the other Silene in cultivation that I'm aware of. This has tiny flowers massed into thrift-like heads well above the rosettes of fresh green leaves.
The combination of vivid pink (what colour is that? carmine?) flowers in dark wine red bracts and the violet anthers is extremely striking. The foliage is good too.
In cultivation it is an easy and adaptable species suitable for any moisture retentive soil but is particularly useful for wet sites where something smaller is required.
1L pots ~ £7

Happy Potlings!

Happy potlings, originally uploaded by peganum.

Being somewhat new to this business, the novelty of having a greenhouse full of babies hasn't worn-off yet. It's extremely exciting.
Until last year I'd only raised a few items here and there for fun or if I needed something specific for a garden. I'd done some courses (one especially good one at Armidale tech, NSW) and paid close attention to what other nurseries did. I raised my plants as well as I could (and often ended up with a lot more than I knew what to do with) but I never really had to develop what you might call a production system before. It's what's known as a steep learning curve.

I'm obviously reluctant to give away trade secrets - a customer asked me recently where I got my seeds from and I said something vague about the internet, but the fact is that the internet has been absolutely indispensible, both for hunting out likely looking species that are not easily available over here in the UK, and for finding people to sell me the seeds. In the process I've also made a few friends.

So, what have I learned in the last twelve months?
Vigilance - that's one thing. Neighbours might have a spotted me in slippers, PJs and fleece, with a torch, prowling about out here, periodically dropping something on the path and squishing it into oblivion. I make no excuse for this. For whatever reason the local pest control team (hedgehogs, slow worms, toads) are not doing their job and I have to step in and thin the slimy hoard. It's become a nightly ritual although the period spent at said ritual has decreased lately as the new shoots firm up and the slugs amuse themselves elsewhere.

 Making more space is the other thing. Not for nothing is this blog called Far Too Many Plants. I've no idea where I'm going to put it all. The original idea with the 12 x 8 greenhouse my wife very kindly bought me a few years back was to keep half with benches for growing my weird and rare plants, and half with borders filled with compost for growing tomatoes and basil and such like. That was before I decided to try to run a nursery. As a consequence, all last winter my newly potted cuttings sat in blue mushroom crates on top of the compost - horribly vulnerable and intolerably risky with freshly pricked seedlings. I just couldn't see the slugs coming at all. So this last couple of weeks I've been out with the timber and the hammer and the expletives, building new benches. It all looks very neat but I still don't know where I'm going to put everything...

What else? More sand in the compost (at least for young plants and dry climate plants) keeps it more open and drained for longer, and to try not to prick out more than one seedling per pot. This I have trouble with. I'm too soft. I hate throwing seedlings out when they've gone to all that trouble coming up for me and I've tended to put two or three in each pot (as insurance, in case one dies, ha ha.) You can do this with some species. The seedlings either coexist or there's a certain amount of 'self-thinning' as I believe the foresters call it, meaning that the weaker seedlings get out-competed by the stronger and disappear. In the worst case scenario though, all survive but none thrive. Stanleya pinnata and Penstemon palmeri I think suffered this way last year.

Another punishing winter took it's toll but much less so than last year. The greenhouse was minimally heated and fleeced (see article) so it didn't drop below -5C but limited space meant some relatively young plants had to sit outside. I chose only those that I believed to be fully hardy but, like I say, it's a steep learning curve. Plants aren't necessarily killed by the cold per se, but, if they're sick or weak for some reason (or too small), winter is when this'll catch up with them. All the Hibiscus made it through by the way, in their pots, out in all weathers, as did Senna hebecarpa - my most experimental new items. All the Desmodium and Asclepias, Colquhounia and Caryopteris divaricata made it. Those that didn't make it include Nepeta govaniana, Spigelia marilandica and Atropa belladonna. All sizable plants, and I'd have thought, pretty hardy. Strange.

Anyway, there's lots of exciting new things coming along.
As soon as they're ready you will, of course, be the first to know.

Happy Spring to all our customers.

Nurseries vs Garden Centres

It's a bit late now but I was very sorry to see that one of my favourite nurseries closed down last year, or rather, they were taken over by one of the big chains (clue: it rhymes with 'why sales'.)
It was a sad day for me because it was a place we used to go when my dad was alive and they had a nice tea shop and a very unusual selection of indoor plants (rare species Begonias for example. Evidently someone who worked there was an enthusiast.)

It was an unusual place actually in that it had a lot in common with what we know as garden centres (a lot of garden ornaments, composts and sundries and the tea shop) but it was independently owned (not part of a chain) and probably as a result of this it had a quirky character and an idiosyncratic selection of plants on sale, many of them produced on site and not too expensive.  When it was bought out, the oddities disappeared, the place was 'tidied up' and the prices rose by, I'd say, about 50% (£6.99 rose to £10.99 for a shrub for example. So much for economies of scale.)
Of course, most punters won't know the difference. They go to a garden centre of a Sunday not to pick up a rare Begonia but to peruse the wax cotton jackets, drink a cappachino to a 'Celtic Chill' soundtrack, and maybe take auntie Maude an azalea for her birthday. It's a nice day out.
So why, besides the nostalgia, does it bother me so much that this take-over happened? After all, the public get what they want don't they? The owners were presumably offered a fairly hefty incentive. Probably they retired on the proceeds.

I like that film, The Devil Wears Prada. Besides seeing Anne Hathaway running around in that green dress, I especially like that bit where the Meryl Streep character explains to the Anne Hathaway character that the clothes she wears are not merely stuff (I love the way she says that - 'stuff'.) No - high street fashions are the end result of a tremendous effort involving designers and fashion houses, selecting one colour over many other almost identical ones, cutting the shape just so, presenting it on the catwalks in Paris so that it will eventually end up in the local chain store so that we can buy it.

I know nothing about that world. Haute couture is a mystery to me. I'm an ordinary clothes wearer. I buy what I can find reasonably easily in the highstreet (or at the army surplus) if it seems to fit and will do the job and I can afford it. I'm not an expert. Life's too short. You can't be an expert in everything (or many things actually). There are people out there who really love and know about clothes and I have to trust them to provide me with things that will look ok and not fall apart immediately from the vast array of clothes that are produced, or could be produced in the world.

Most people who go to a garden centre are like me in H&M. They may even consider themselves keen gardeners. They no doubt buy the odd copy of Gardener's World, watch Titchmarsh on the telly from time to time, own a copy of the RHS Encyclopedia of Garden Plants. Many may know the names of most of the plants in their garden and a few others besides. They may be members of the RHS or NT. They're ordinary gardeners and quite right too. As I say, life's too short. They can't be an expert in everything and they have to trust the garden centre staff to provide them with plants that will grow well and look good from among the vast array of plants that are grown, or could be grown all over the world.

I can hear the hollow laughter from here ('Trust the staff? Hah!') but even so, I hear you say, if people want obscure Begonias, surely they can go to an obscure begonia nursery? There are plenty of specialist nurseries about. Each to his own. Live and let live, surely?

Unfortunately not. Small specialist nurseries only rarely sell only obscure and unusual plants, and generally only if they are not totally dependent on them for an income. Go to Crug farm in North Wales, renowned for being one of the finest purveyers of rare and obscure plants probably in the world, and if you look at their list you will also find pages and pages of hardy Geraniums on offer which have always been a bit of a speciality of theirs. They're probably less dependent on them now they're known all over the world but I'm fairly certain it was the Geraniums originally that gave them the freedom to offer all the obscure stuff.

For the grower, plants can be divided up into broadly two categories - those that are easy and quick to produce and those that are not. The best garden plants can be found in both groups. Many plants that are difficult to propagate are hardy and reliable once established in the garden. Now, the keen nurseryman will be trying to produce the best garden plants, probably based on his own tastes and experience. They will want to provide the best plants for their customers in the best possible state to transplant quickly and establish easily in the customer's garden. To do this they may need to talk to the customer and provide advice, even if that means discouraging them from buying something because it may disappoint. They will of course be trying to make a living at this, and one way of doing that will be to make sure they offer a range of plants in the 'quick and easy' category (eg Crug Farm's Geraniums) as well as the more awkward stuff.
The problem then with the garden centres, and the wholesalers who supply them is that they tend to cream off the 'quick and easy' plants and ignore the ones that are not (or in a few cases they may offer them as a 'speciality' or 'plantsman's' range of fashionable items with an extravagant price tag. The whole 'architectural' plants thing is the obvious example.)
Either way, the small specialist nursery, unless they are doing it for love, will be forced out of business. Live and let die, you might say.

Will the average punter even notice the loss? Highly doubtful, but the overall result is obvious - the apparent choice and variety at the garden centre masks the actual loss of diversity overall. I see it every time I go to one of these places, but then I've lived and breathed plants for the last thirty years.
Obviously which ornamental plants you can buy for your garden is not a life and death situation, but it does make me wonder about the supposed choice available in other products that I do not know so much about, such as food or clothes, finance or, for example, medicines; as the suppliers get larger in size and fewer in number.
Surely the free market is supposed to promote choice?