A VISIT TO THE ALPINE PLANT SHOW.
The show secretary is calling, time to go to work again. I have to put the winning labels on the show cards, when the judges have finished, but I suppose it stopped me buying plants. Never mind there will still be two hours when the judging is finished and the show opens to the public, and I have not looked at the alpine garden society's own stall yet.
There was a lot of conversation about two Snguinaria canadensis Flore Pleno that were on the bench, and how difficult it was to get them right on the day of the show. Snguinaria are notorious for dropping their petals, and sometimes only last but one day. But the two plants stood firm all day with not the sign of a dropped petal in spite of numerous forecasts that they would drop before the show was over.
Do you know why I was so interested in this discussion? Well one of those Snguinaria plants was mine. It was worth more than ten first prizes.
WINTER RETURNS WITH A VENGENCE.
After a very mild winter and an early spring winter has decided to return with a vengeance. Bitter cold 60mph northerly winds with an assortment of hail sleet and snow showers swept down the estuary in continues waves. I had to resort to the shelter of the greenhouse as any other sort of gardening was out of the question. In between the showers I had to make a quick dash to the garden shed and recover the glass lights that I thought were in storage for the summer. It was a little too late for the bulb frame as most of the flowering stems on the Fritillaries were snapped of in the gale, and those that were still in tact were battered beyond recognition. So the new film that I had bought in anticipation of some nice shots of flowering bulbs is still in the box un-opened.
The cyclamen and Primula frames were covered before much damage was done, luckily I had left the lights beside the plunge frame in case of emergency.
With the chores all finished and the welcome shelter of the greenhouse I took the opportunity to have a close look at some of the new primula seedlings. Breeding new varieties of plants is something of a hit and miss affair, with thousands of seedlings sometimes yielding only one or two plants worthy of
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