A LICENSE TO SELL PLANTS
After a very mild winter and a beautiful spring, winter came back with a vengeance the week before Easter and continued through the holiday weekend. The temperatures plummeted, and hail, sleet, and snow showers continued day and night. Most days the temperature never managed to climb above six or seven degrees centigrade, with a howling northerly gale that produced a wind chill factor of minus five degrees centigrade. The nights produced widespread frost with minus four degrees centigrade recorded on four occasions. This is much lower than anything we have had all winter, and is unusual for this part of the coastline. Maybe El Nino in paying us a visit at last.
With the beautiful early spring weather that we had enjoyed, most plants were way ahead of their normal growth at this time, and the new growth has now been reduced to a brown and unsightly mess. Instead of a nice light green fresh looking Griselinia hedge,( Griselinia littoralis) I now have to look out a something resembling a beech hedge(Fagus sylvatica) in wintertime. I continually warn people against such an event at this time of year.
Instead of an early spring we are now going to have a late spring, because I find that it takes longer for plants to recover from frost damage after they have started to grow, than to be delayed by cold weather from starting into growth. Pieris is one of the groups of plants that seem to be triggered into growth by light rather than temperature (it is light sensitive). This leads to its demise in colder parts of the country every spring where it gets a late frost.
Last week in a local market, where most of the stalls were displaying Pieris in all its forms, with about six inches of lovely red new growth (obviously forced in a polythene tunnel), a neighbour asked my advice about buying two of them for her daughter. I told her that although it was early April and the weather was fine, there was no guarantee that we would not get a late frost, and if such an event should occur, the new growth would be reduced to a brown sorry mess. I am not sure if she took my advice, but if not, no doubt she has now suffered the consequences, which brings me to the main point of this article.
SHOULD PEOPLE WHO SELL PLANTS HAVE TO QUALIFY TO DO SO?
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