Pittosporums in the Snow....
- To: m*@ucdavis.edu
- Subject: Pittosporums in the Snow....
- From: t*@eddy.u-net.com (Tim Longville)
- Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2000 18:35:18 GMT
Moira, David: Many thanks for helpful and encouraging info. Well, I
hope it will *prove* to be helpful and encouraging, if and when our
sudden shift to the (by our standards) sub-artic comes to an end.
Temps. went up yesterday with the inevitable result - heavy falls of
snow yesterday evening, overnight, and this morning. Great for the
local kids and dogs, less great for the local gardeners. Less great
for folks trying to get to work or back from holidays, too, of course
- our Aussie visitors left at dawn, trying to get down to London by
car: no word yet of their arrival (12 hours for a journey which would
usually take less than half that) so either they're still crawling, or
completely stuck, or have arrived and collapsed exhausted. And for
this they left temps of 30+ in Canberra last week!
By the time I got out into the garden with a long pole, several hefty
tree and shrub branches had crashed under the weight of snow - and
several plants which had looked sick but not dead as a result of sheer
cold now look as though they've definitively thrown in the towel. Is
there anything in the world which looks sadder than a dead 5ft high
Isoplexis? - except perhaps a dead 8ft tall Echium pininana? (Heaves a
heavy sigh...!)
Some of my more marginal olearias aren't looking well, ditto
prostantheras, but callistemons, melaleucas, correas and, yes,
indeedy, pittosporums, so far all seem still to be in the fight.
The pittosporums, BTW, include both 'Irene Patterson' (no trouble
growing her here, I must say: indeed, one of the most vigorous) and
'Tom Thumb,' both of which Moira mentioned. I guess there are around
20 or so P. tenuifolium cultivars available in the UK - and I'd guess
most were introduced from NZ, and most of those by Graham Hutchins of
County Park Nurseries in Hornchurch, Essex. They don't, though,
include any of those mentioned by David, so it sounds as though
perhaps there's a 'separate development' of P. t. cultivars going on
in CA?!
I tried P. undulatum here but it never looked happy and expired some
time ago. At the moment, I'm cossetting some encouragingly vigorous
seedlings of P. viridis from S. Africa but they're safely stashed in
the greenhouse: I wouldn't fancy their chances of surviving what's on
offer here at the moment -
Which makes Mexico sound an even more than usually attractive
proposition: I hope you have a good time, David, and find lots of good
plants.
Tim
Tim Longville
