Friday 29th May, 2020
Hi
We are nearly there... the nursery is almost looking as it should for this time of year.. and totally gorgeous! If you have been out lately you'll have seen the big space in the centre (which is not quite as big as it should be as there are still roses sitting on it). This area is being prepared for the potting season which begins Tuesday with our first delivery of roses from Glenavon Roses, the start of
Rob Somerfields collection.
All the orders that were occupying our potting area have now been reduced and moved so that we can now actually get potting. Thanks to all of you who helped by providing a town address so we could dispatch some rural deliveries and we have had word that we can now start sending the remaining rural deliveries.... Wahoo!!!
Ang has been making sure that the nursery now has all the plants that we would normally have in at this time of year. We are proud of our extensive selections of
Camellias,
Azaleas,
Pieris,
winter roses and all manner of
citrus just to name drop a few.
The gardening team have ripped around and sorted all the hedges with a much needed trim and they are looking pretty suave. aLooking from my point of view... we have certainly made big inroads to making up those six lost weeks.
To that end I need the rest of that space in the garden centre and so all those remaining roses, sitting there taking up space they are not supposed to have, are all now half price... Not available by mail order so you have to pop out and have a reccy.
Is masculinity proven?
My poor male Idesia trees' masculinity was in question the other week with the sighting of a small number of berries it had produced... Not my field of expertise, Virgina, on the other hand, is totally fascinated in the subject of plant genetics. She went and found some research on plant plasticity... LOL I don't even know what that means but I got a quick refresher on some stuff from 30 years ago when I did my studies by correspondence.
I will see if I can get by and make this simple for us both! So flowers come as, what I call, perfect ie male and female in the same flower. I believe that Virginia called them hermaphrodite.. of which many plants are.
Then there are plants that are monecious... which are those that have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Dioecious plants have separate male and female trees and so our poor Idesia is an example of being dioecious. Now, just briefly, its not always just genetics that play their part here but also environment and a change, or stress, in environment may have an effect of how plants behave. I think that if you go back so some school science it's called Genotype and Phenotype.. which may have been our Idesias' response of producing some berries... after all, survival is what it's all about... anyways, that enough of that.
Let's chat about Podocarps or, more correctly, I should say Podocarpus... probably from around the age of gondwanaland and dinosaurs... just by the way, any of this group of plants are Dioecious though some are monecious... and produce male catkins and a simple single separate flower.. those bigh stands of kahikatea behinds us make for lots of pollen in the seasons but its the fruit and seed thats fascinating.. did you know that you can eat the orange part of the kakikatea seed...
moving right along another fab Podocarp is our native totara which just happens to make for a stunning long term hedge and a really good examp[ler of whgich can be seen at the Hasmilton gardens... I think that I have become
peonies
citrus
hedges
want something different to clip
roses roses roses all current seasons slashed by 50%
Its no surprise that this season is rolling along quite differently from other years and due to lock down we missed our usual reduction off of the last of the roses .. the new seasons roses are due next week to be potted and I need the space that they are occupying.. To that end its half price for all current seasons roses that we have in the garden centre. sorry but not available for mail order -
Queens birthday being a long weekend
have a great weekend