February flowers

It's a bit chilly and rather damp, but the garden is slowly, imperceptibly, filling up with flowers again.

The bulbs are getting my gardening fingers itching: clump after clump of snowdrops has appeared in the long grass and I didn't even realise they were there. They've hung on in the face of decades of neglect (I'm told by my neighbours it's over 20 years since a gardener lived here): and though I'm also told they aren't nearly as plentiful as they once were, I'm planning to do something about that. I have visions of sheets of snowdrops underplanted with aconites and cyclamen dancing in my head...

But for now I'm just enjoying what I have. It's even better in the greenhouse, where the overwintering geraniums are putting on a fabulous show and cheering me up no end (do they ever rest, do you think?) and even my little scented-leaf pretties are shyly unfurling a few petals.

So, in the wind and the rain, I've been out today taking a few photos for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. Enjoy!

Scents and sensibility

Hold onto your wallets! Plant fair season has begun!

Despite their utterly lethal effect on my bank balance, I can't resist a good plant fair. I go to all of them: the one at the village hall, the fundraiser at a local garden, and most of all the rare and unusual plant fairs. I don't often get a proper Rare Plant Fair coming to my neck of the woods apart from the London ones, which almost always seem to happen when I'm nowhere near London. But a very close second are the Plant Heritage plant fairs run by local groups and always packed with choice nurseries from all around the area (and sometimes considerably outside it).

So it was last Sunday when we had a single rainy day amid two weeks of relentless sunshine and that was the day Plant Heritage's Surrey Group held its plant fair (the first of three! Oh happy days...) There was much sploshing about with umbrellas and dripping hats: the stallholders were stalwart and resolute and Very Very British. And would you believe there was quite a crowd of galosh-wearing gardeners, also being Very British about the weather and shopping like mad.

I'm not allowed to buy any more plants for the garden at the moment. Not that it stops me, but I'm trying not to stock up my borders too much more as it'll all just have to be dug out again after we sell the house and that will just make me feel guilty.

So I was munging around feeling frustrated when I caught sight of this little corner of an un-named stall.



I am usually a little snobby about pelargoniums. They're all right, but have something of the granny about them even if they're in trendy shades of plum purple (the only ones I can bear to have about the place. Or maybe white).

But these, dear reader, aren't just pelargoniums: these are scented-leaved pelargoniums.

It's at times like this I wish this were a scratch-and-sniff blog. Take those leaves between your fingers and rub gently. Your fingers will come away redolent of smoky cinnamon; perfumed with the scent of rose-petals; tangy with lemon.

Pelargonium 'Little Gem': rose-lemon scents

The flowers are small and delicate and not at all showy, just as I like them: I can even forgive them for being mostly pink. As with most plants which are all about the foliage, they have such very interesting foliage, too.


Pelargonium 'Crispum Variegatum': another lemony one
It's not often I like a variegated leaf, but this is not variegation for the sake of variegation. Small and interestingly crinkled, the leaves give off a spicy citrus scent if you brush past it. This one can apparently be trained to shape: now that might make topiary interesting.


Pelargonium 'Lara Jester'
I think I like the rose-scented leaves best: they certainly have the sweetest perfume. I covet 'Attar of Roses' and one day will find it again: it remains the one that got away after I decided a few years back that a huge plant for just three quid was one too many for the car boot. How wrong can you be.

Other scents are definitely more savoury and might best be described as 'interesting' - certainly spicy rather than conventionally perfumed. But one day I shall build up enough plants to pick and dry the leaves for pot-pourri, and then they will come into their own: I dream of lemony P. graveolens, or P. odoratissimum which is said to smell of Granny Smith apples. 'Prince of Orange' - does what it says on the tin - 'Copthorne' - smells of cedar - and P. dichondraefolium, smelling of black pepper, are close behind.

As it was, I came away with P. 'Ardwick Cinnamon' (white flowers, leaves the scent of cakes in autumn), P. 'Cy's Sunburst' (variegated gold with a lemony fragrance) and the intriguingly curly-leaved P. graveolens 'Bontrosai', with a perfume of roses. I always said I wouldn't start collecting plants, but I fear I may have succumbed.

It's a cabbage moth!

Remember those caterpillars I found on my client's pelargoniums?

Well - thank you to all who replied. Plant Mad Nige offered a tentative ID as an Angle Shades Moth - but here's the pic of their caterpillars from the RHS's advice sheet on the subject:

(image: Tim Sandall).

Not really very similar to my little critter:

But enter the RHS's Principal Entomologist (no less), A J Halstead, who suggests my little friend is a rather more humbly-named Cabbage Moth - aka Mamestra brassicae. I looked this up on UK Moths - and sure enough:

(picture (c) Dave Griffin)

I think we have our culprit. Sadly he is a culprit, too - the moth is described as a "notorious pest" on UK Moth's info page on the subject, scoffing not only all members of the brassica family but clearly pelargoniums too.

Still - I love solving a good mystery. Now I have to go murder a lot of rather pretty caterpillars...

Getting things through the winter

I was checking over my geraniums this week. I've got a few I'm overwintering for myself, plus a few for a couple of clients, and then there's another client who has a whole balcony full of them and needs them all lifting in autumn, overwintering and then setting back out in spring.

You'll hear lots of different methods of overwintering geraniums (I should say, more correctly, pelargoniums), but here's what I do. It's pretty simple.

You take the plants out of the pots they've been in all summer, and pot up in a plastic pot which just fits the roots (i.e. you don't have too much spare soil left over). General-purpose compost is fine - anything too loamy and they get too damp. Then I take the secateurs to them: any leggy stems are cut back to a bud or leaf joint about 4-5" (10cm or so) above soil level. It seems drastic, but it keeps the plants compact as they'll grow again from these points next year instead of starting a foot or two up in the air.

I give them one, very light watering, taking care not to wet leaves or stems, mostly just to settle them in to the pots. And then I switch on the greenhouse heater with the thermostat set to a few degrees above zero, and leave them to it.

I water them maybe twice the whole winter long. There are two secrets to overwintering pelargoniums successfully: first, they need to be very nearly bone dry, so once you've watered them when you transplant them, that's pretty much it until February.

Second, you need to check them over at least once a week and remove any dead or dying leaves and stems. Botrytis, or downy mildew, or whatever that fluffy mould is that grows on dead geranium leaves is murder for overwintering plants and will spread like wildfire. You need to remove the leaves regularly to keep it in check, and take them out of the greenhouse too so the spores aren't hanging around. If you do it regularly, you'll find the fresh leaves will stay fresh and you'll have greenery all winter. Harden them off carefully in early May, when you're sure frosts are past (probably a bit later further north) and you can keep them going for years.