Ten days ago 56 cardboard boxes packed tight with bare root plants arrived and, for lack of a better home, were piled up in the tea room. After a few sprint potting sessions, mostly by Janet and Sally, with fitful contributions from me and Ewan, there are 12 full boxes left to go, a huge pile of empty boxes in the back of the potting shed and half a polytunnel beautifully laid out with happily growing plants.

It’s a delight to see so much done at this stage in the year, though it’s just the start – there are more bare roots to come in the next few weeks as well as our own division work to fit in. I try to space the deliveries out to give us some breathing space – we’d be overwhelmed otherwise.

When I first took over here, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from my first bare root delivery. Before the advent of plastic pots it was the main way of supplying plants to gardens, but while its still fairly common for trees and hedging, it’s now very rare for retail customers to buy bare root herbaceous perennials. So let me show you what we get.

See? Exactly as described. Bare rooted. These are Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’, lifted from a field in Norfolk last week, packed tight in boxes and shipped to nurseries like mine for potting up.

There are 80 plants in this one box, so you can see how efficient it is as a method of distributing semi-mature plants. These are about 10″ long and will go straight into their final pot size. Buying like this means we can use our own peat-free compost, thus minimising both transport weight and costs and unwanted peat use.

While everyone else has been focused and productive, I’ve been flitting, as usual. Half a day in the potting shed, half a day laying a new floor in the polytunnel, a few hours tidying the nursery, some messing about making the new chicken run and a short spell in the garden. Peter does the bulk of the winter tidy-up in the garden, working his way methodically through each border, carefully weeding and cutting back. I zip about, staying one step ahead of him so that I can prune the shrubs as I like and then following behind him to pick off the jobs he hates, like tidying the Yucca.

It is a fearful beast of a plant, each leaf ending in a terminal spike hard and sharp enough to spear leather with. Peter will wear gloves if need be, but won’t be seen dead in a pair of protective glasses. I’m not so proud – I’d rather keep my eyes intact, thank you.

Two very cold winters have damaged many of the older leaves and the central trunk had rotted right through. It’s really a case of getting stuck in with a saw and a very sharp knife:


The garden is slowly coming to life too, though as I’ve said before, the original owners didn’t plant it for winter especially. I’ll change that over time. There’s a lovely burnt-orange witch hazel in the cottage garden, but it’s set a long way back in the border and is flat-lit by the sun. Unless I step over the pond to get the sunlight behind it, it just looks like a straggly shrub with a few brown, dead leaves clinging on.

Way up at the top of the garden is a Parrotia persica, which I’ve never seen listed as a winter interest shrub, but right now it is dotted with tiny little jewel-like pomegranate coloured flowers. It’s not showy, but it is fascinating.

And in the exotic garden, now almost empty but for the bare stems of the Paulownia, the ground is dotted with cricket ball-sized Petasites japonicus flowers, as if tossed onto the soil in some bizarre version of french boules. Very strange they are indeed.

In other news, my show garden design for Tatton Show has been accepted – I now need to work up the planting list and attempt to draw it. I could sub the drawing job, as I have done for the last two years, but feel I should attempt to finally master an actual drawing. It can’t, just can’t be totally beyond me.

And I have received my very first rejection from a publisher for my book. Exciting – a real rejection letter! So much better than nothing at all. I will admit that writing it has all but dried up. In the absence of a real deadline to finish the book, the nursery and garden have me in their spring thrall…

As you’ve been good enough to read to the end, I shall tell you that the photo at the top is Geranium himalayense ‘Gravetye’ I love the fresh spring shoots – the best colour of all I think. Wonderful ground cover plant, even for dry shade.

And I have been reading ‘The Anthologist’ by Nicholson Baker, in little slivers of time between other things. Loving it – the perfect antidote to a jam-packed life.

February 12, 2011