Re: Overwintering Cannas and Hedychium

Bette - On the Solway Coast in Cumbria (wetter and soggier than which you do not get... - at least, not easily), I find that quite a few hedychium in fact survive in the ground perfectly ok (H. densiflorum, forrestii, etc) - trouble is they're then so slow back into new growth that they tend not to flower. So round about now what I usually do is simply chomp up a couple of clumps (nothing sophisticated: sharp spade and whoosh) into sections of two or three 'eyes', pot those into ordinary gritty well-drained compost, trimming roots as and when required, and keep'em fairly dry in the shady rear section of a greenhouse kept just about frost-free. Then I start them back into growth late winter/early spring and push them on with more light and heat and lots of food and water, to give them a head start before they go back in the ground.
 
I don't grow many cannas here because we just don't get enough natural summer heat for them to perform well. (I've never quite worked out why in terms both of growth and flowering the ginger lilies do quite reasonably [some of them indeed really well], the cannas relatively poorly: I'd have expected both to have the same sort of hot'n'humid summer requirements as their ideal: no?) Those I do grow, though, I treat in much the same way as the ginger lilies - except that in their case *all* of the plants come out of the ground and into pots in the greenhouse or coldframe: I've never managed to over-winter even C. indica in the ground here - just too wet, I guess.
 
Tim
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