RE: Wondering about the members...

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Hi Nan,

Yes, I am still here, it was kind of you to think of me

. Normal domesticity battles against the demands of the plants, never more so than now when the fantasy Mediterranean feels so far away.   Actually the real Mediterranean sounds no better than England, my seven months pregnant daughter had to start her journey from the South of France to a  funeral here last week, battling through the snowdrifts on a tractor.  Thankfully we got shot of 300,000 sprigs of rosemary (for garnishing free range turkeys) just before the freeze-up began. The other daughter in France, fortunately the one  at the bottom of the mountain had the original idea of  beating her sister to the draw and presented me with a grandson on Christmas day. Orders for plants for two Tudor re-creations and one eighteenth century American garden have just come in, though in this economic climate I won’t really believe in them until the contracts have been signed and the plants paid for. 

I decided that if no one had any money, there was no point in spending my own on heating plants, which no one could afford, so we tucked them up in bubble wrap and told them to get on with it. However I admit to having been somewhat seduced by all the government’s tax raising hype about global warming and never expected it to be as cold as it was, certainly colder than at any time since I set the nursery up on this site in 1986. The surprise is what has lived and what has died, lesser Galingales seem to have survived, the greater galingales haven’t. Some Patchoulis are clinging on, Satureia douglasii has never looked better. Leptosperms look sick, Pelargoniums and Melaleucas OK, Dracaenas appear to be remarkably healthy, heliotropes look dead, Salvias have taken a terrible battering and it is extraordinary the difference made by the gradient in the tunnel, the plants at the higher end looking so much better than those at the lower end. I haven’t dared look at the North Americans yet, without their natural snow cover, they are inclined to winter badly here in the South west of England anyway.

It’s now six days since the thaw and already shoots of life are appearing, on the Laserpitium for instance, but plants are like sheep, just when you think you have got them through a really hard period more or less unscathed, they promptly fall over with all their feet in the air, so I refuse to be lulled into a false sense of security.

All of which has dragged me away from my winter occupation of compiling  a dictionary of medieval medicinal plant names, a much more pleasant occupation during the icy months than repairing burst water pipes.

Glad Alessandra is still with us, the way she used colour in her American Academy garden was a revelation and the high point of my trip to Rome a few years ago. Happy new year everyone

 

Anthony