Tracking change

Many garden bloggers seem to track the progress of their garden if not individual plants, often posting photos of plants in previous years.  It is definitely a simple way to record the growth of plants, one I use a lot.

Sedeveria letizia July 2014

Sedeveria letizia May 2015

Sadly not all plants show a lot of change between photos and so other methods of recording growth have to be used.  It is sad how geeky I get over this.

So the first method is a simple ruler.

Arenaria aurea May2015

This works fine for plants that actually get bigger, but the agaves were the plants that kept frustrating me.  I started thinking about marking the latest leaf, at first using nail polish on the terminal spine.  For a while we had quite a few very bright terminal spines.

In the end I found the solution on one of the plant forums, in which someone placed washers over the terminal spine. So simple.

Now I simply place the washer on the newest leaf at the start of spring and at the end of summer, even if there was no obvious growth, it's possible to see how many new leaves there are.

There have been a few questions about the washers, but a lot less than about the neon nail polish. Does anyone else have strange methods to track the progress of their plants?

Sedeveria letizia is my favourite plant in the garden

Another little Crassulaceae is standing out for me this week.  Sedeveria letizia is a hybrid between sedum cuspidatum x echeveria setosa var. ciliatait, it is a small branching succulent that grows to around 20cm tall, with rosettes of around 5cm. The leaves are green with a red tinge depending on light levels.  In full sun, or when stressed, it is almost totally red, in shade the rosettes are totally green.

I have been trying it in different types of pots and now planted in the succulent rockery, I am interested to see how this one develops over the rest of the summer. Will it grow up or hang down?

The colour is great and it has already started to send out new branches from the base, which is one of the unusual things about this plant.  It doesn't tend to branch from higher up. The older stems can be quite long and skinny, but with new heads forming all the time, it stays nice and bushy.

One of the great things about the plant is that you can simply cut heads off and plant them up to give new plants.  If done at the start of spring, by the end of summer it will have started to branch.  This gives lots of opportunities to sculpt the plant. This is my main plant, sadly having been in the greenhouse it is green, but I love it anyway. Now things are more settled, it has been placed outside in the hope of getting some colour.

It flowers well, with multiple stalks per stem. The flower themselves are almost pure white (I told you I had a thing for white flowers) and like echeveria flowers they last a long time. For me it is usually in flower from April to June.

If you leave it long enough without cutting it up, it will form aerial roots. These can be left to grow, or removed, it doesn't seem to affect the plant either way.  It is possible to leave select roots and these slowly bulk up to give roots that will support the longer stems. 

Sadly it's not perfect, for a start it is not totally hardy.  Apparently it is hardy to -7C (20F) so far it has been fine in my unheated cold frames or greenhouse. It is borderline for my garden, so it will be interesting to see how the planted one copes this winter.  The other thing to be aware of, is it can get leggy if over-fed or grown in lower light levels.  I have fallen foul of this a few times (it is really very easy) and had to cut the plant up and start over again. 

So there you have sedeveria letizia, my favourite plant in the garden this week. Head over to Danger Garden to see Lorees and others selection.

What are the signs of your plant addiction?

At this time of year there is no hiding it, every windowsill is covered in plants, with a few of the larger ones on tables or by doors and generally scattered around the house.  The other common symptom is watching out for nurseries when visiting new locations.  This was in full flow at the weekend, it was too much when a sign appeared at the side of the road saying "Largest selection of alpines in the UK". Permission was granted for a QUICK stop and I left with 4 little pots and a big smile.

Sometimes it the signs are more subtle, on seeing these my first thought what great planters, drainage holes and everything.  Why can't we find troughs like this in London.

It took me a while to realise they were coffins.

Being in a grave yard at the time, should probably have been a clue.

I still think they would make great troughs, a definite talking point in the garden. I am obviously not alone. When I told this to a friend he sent me a link to a story about a couple who had planted up a trough they found in their new garden. Only to find out it was a unique roman  coffin worth £100000! (Here is a link to the story).

This is not unusual for me, I have notice that I tend to look at objects thinking about their potential as planters.  A big log that could be hollowed out, an old bird bath, or that toy dumper trunk that is crying out to be planted up.

So do you have any less obvious symptoms of your plant addiction?

Common does that matter?

Agave americana is probably the most common agave world wide.  In many parts of the world it is almost a weed, with the prolific offsets. Even in the UK as one of the hardy agaves it is the one you will see in peoples gardens, and the odd news paper when they flower.  The different varieties of this plant can pretty much represent the changes many succulent collections go through.

The plain plant is often the first agave you own, I know it was mine, and I remember how excited I was to get a given a few of them.  This pretty much sealed my fate, and I was soon searching more varieties of agave.  It was not long before I realised that there were far more interesting plants out there and unless you have a huge amount of space to fill, as new plants come in this one goes out.

Once you have a few agaves many people start to look at variegated plants, only slightly less common is the marginata form.  Again my first variegated agave, and it was given pride of place in the garden for a while.

The problem with obsessions though is that you are never happy with what you have,  there is always something better out there.   So having gone through the common plants, you start to look for slightly more unusual plants.  The medio picta alba plant fits perfectly into that category.  It is not so common that you see them every day , but when you start looking it is easy to find.  So out with the marginata form in with the medio-picta albas.

Where next, you have the plants that are easy to find,  so onto those that are harder to find.  Now you are slipping into obsession status; it's no longer just about seeing plants and buying them,  it changing to searching for that elusive variety that few people have.  Yet again agave americana pops up, this time in the striata (stripy variegation) and the medio-picta aurea (yellow stripe) forms. 

By now, you are probably getting fussy and each plant is worthy of a place.  This means that it is more difficult to decide what to do when space runs out.  Medio-picta alba is a lovely, too good to just bin, so it gets shifted into a less prominent place and this is the dance that happens with each new plant.

You may feel that agave americana is too common, so lets change to the plants that have come out recently.  Starting with agave blue glow,  soon you're moving on to the variegates snow glow and sun glow.  What's that a new one just about to be released! The plants may have changed but the story is always the same. I wonder what we would think if agave americana wasn't on every street, if it was a hybrid just coming onto the market?

Wierd places to track down that elusive plant

I am always amazed by the lengths plants enthusiasts will go to to find plants.  It's not just the driving huge distances, or the amount of plants that get crammed into cars.  It's also the ingenuity that goes into always managing to fit at least one quick peak into a nursery or garden no matter where. This got me thinking about what was the most unusual place I have found plants.

For me it has to be on a stag do.

Yes I even managed to slip a bit of plant hunting into a stag do a couple years back. This one was in  Bournemouth for a spot of water-skiing and admittedly a lot of drinking. We were staying in this funny little hotel on the edge of town and as I was parking I spotted a couple of green houses tucked away at the back of the car park. Now my friends are not at all interested in plants, and even if they were, there are strict rules about behaviour and plant hunting is not exactly on the list. 

Having bided my time, I finally managed to find a point to sneak off and have a quick look around the green houses.  Not really expecting to find anything of interest I was surprised to find them full of succulents.  It got better when looking closely I started noticing a few less common ones. The owner came over to say hello and it turned out she was a keen succulent collector who spent half the year in warmer climates where most of her plants were, but she couldn't help but keep some in the UK.  It turned out many spares were for sale at 99p although some were more expensive at a whopping cost of £3. 

So I had a really good rummage around the pots,  the plant addicts here will know what I mean, when you search every single pot in the hope of finding that gem in among everything else. Sure enough I found a couple of aloes I had been after,  really decent sized plants and rare, so I didn't really expect her to sell them.  To my amazement she thought about it for a bit and then said OK as they would be going to a good home.  I had to try to control my grin at getting such bargains. 

So here is my little haul form that trip, I did buy a few others to go with the bargains:

The main plant was this aloe karasbergensis which is a form of a. striata.  You just don't find these in the UK so find one this size for £3 was great.

And as it was there I thought I might as well get the normal a. striata as well.

Sadly all subsequent stag weekends have been plant hunting free, and that is still the most unusual place / occasion I have found plants.  So what was yours?

Experimenting

I must confess to being a bit of a geek, this takes many forms in my spiky addiction.

Clues that you are spiky obsessed No. 3: You keep a list of all the plants you buy.

I would guess many people have lists, surely there is nothing geeky about it. Well I may have taken this a tiny bit further than most people, setting up a database with all the plants, when and where I bought them, if it is a species or hybrid and anything else I feel is useful.  I also take photos of most plants in spring and again in autumn so I can follow their growth.  It is fun especially at this time of year to sit and look through them.

A small selection of the 120 pots I ended up with on this trial

Probably the main way my geekiness shows up is in the experiments on my poor plants. One of my biggest so far was a seed germination trial.  As I have always learnt by trial and error, I wanted to see what effect planting medium and heat made. Between having 5 different aloes, 3 planting mediums and 4 different heat settings you can probably guess where this is going, I ended up with a LOT of pots and with my poor OH looking on in despair.

Then of course I ended up with around 60 - 80 seedlings of each aloe  and I started trying to kill these.  I am sure I'm not the only one to put small pots out of the way and then forget about them.  Who would have thought this would not be the best way to ensure maximum growth rates.

The plant on the left was given good care,  the ones on the left were left to get on with it.

You would think this would be enough for the poor plants, but come winter I then got to try different hardiness tests.  Which was not pretty and I will not traumatize you with photos! A couple of years later and I am down to about 5 of each variety.  I am pleased to say I have given a lot away and it is not purely me killing them.

I doubt I will ever stop my experiments,   but my OH is hoping that in the future they involve a lot less pots.

From dogs to dragons.

One of the highlights of my spiky obsession is meeting others who share it. So I took advantage of being in Yorkshire to arrange to drop in on another agave fan.  I love these visits as apart from having the opportunity to have a nosy around their plants,  it is great to be able to sit down and talk with others who are as obsessed as you.

That reminds me. Clues that you are spiky obsessed No. 2: You always try to sneak in one visit to a collection or garden whenever you go away.

This latest trip was a fine example,  and I was welcomed by the whole family who kindly let me gate crash their Saturday.  One thing I am always interested in is how involved partners are.  I am sure my OH will be relieved that she is not the only one to look at windowsills full of plants with resignation (but I am pleased to say not without a smile).   But enough of the sandwiches and cake (thank you by the way), there were plants to look at and it was out to the greenhouse.

I think it is safe to say that these trips are one sure way to add to the list of plants you want in your collection!  Having seen some photos of his collection before the trip I knew which plants I was looking forward to seeing,  but they are so much better in person.  This little agave filfera is beautiful and was on my list before seeing it. Sadly despite a couple of very unsubtle hints,  and even trying to carry the pot out with me,  it will have to stay on my list for a little longer.

This agave gypsophila ivory curls was also stunning.  It is one I have been considering since seeing photos and plant in another friend's collection,  but this one was enough to tip me over the edge and I am now going to have to go out and find one for myself.  Again hints and tricks were unsuccessful, but at least I left with the knowledge that they are in a good home!

There were of course many other lovely plants all in fantastic condition so here are a couple more, just for pure indulgence!!

Agave parasana variegate

Agave kissho kan variegate

Agave isthmensis variegate

Thanks again to my host and his family.  While I was a little distracted by the plant talk,  I did have time to see a toy that allows you to build lots of different aliens, very clever and I may have to look it out as a Christmas present for one of my nephews! Of course you never leave these trips empty handed, and while I couldn't wangle either the plants mentioned above,  I was kindly allowed to liberate the pup off this lovely little agave parryi var patoni.

I couldn't end without giving a mention to Indy the Bearded Dragon who seems to have a taste for cockroaches and sunbathing. He was absolutely stunning, and I'm pleased to say more than a little spiky!

Light at last

There should be a saying: you can choose where you work,  but not the desk you sit at.  Up until May this meant I sat in an office without windows.  So while it may seem unexciting to most people I was very exciting to move to my new office where I had not just one but two windows!

Obviously the main reason for my excitement had little to do with the natural light I would now be getting during the day,  but the flat surfaces in front of the window which make perfect places to over winter a few plants.  So for 10 days my OH was thrilled to see two plants each day leaving with me to work,  (and unusually nothing coming back).

Clues you are a spiky obsessed No. 1: You look at windows and windowsills, not as good sources of light for you, but as perfect places to overwinter your plants!

The windows were being cleaned over the weekend and so they had to be moved off the windowsills onto filing cabinets. I quite like them all lined up like this,  plus of course it means the windowsills are empty again!