Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Primula scotica and Taxus



  1. Taxus baccata 'Amersfoort'

Been a while

It's been a while since my last entry so a wee update here. I have really been enjoying doing my gardening presentations this year and a recent one took me up to the wonderful Comox Valley where I had the pleasure of staying with Leslie and John after the meeting. It was one of those not so common situations where you meet two very keen gardeners who both have a keen eye for a good plant but also know where to place it in the garden, many collectors of plants have a slight weakness in the design aspects, including myself, (although I often plant a bed with the desire to obtain stock plants so will treat the bed as a collection of mother plants rather than a intricately designed system) John rules in the back garden, the Duchess of Dirt in the front and this amicable arrangement seems to work brilliantly. Thank you to you both for your wonderful hospitality and thank you Comox Horticultural Society for a great evening.
At the moment I now seem to have more of a range of conifers than I have ever had and finally I have my hands on a favourite Ginkgo biloba 'Troll'. I have seen this one in the ground and appears to be a dwarf with a spreading low habit. I probably have around five cultivars of Ginkgo now. I am pleased to finally have saleable plants of the Taxus that thinks it is a Podocarpus: Taxus baccata 'Amersfoort' which was originally discovered in a Dutch Psychiatric Hospital.
More later.
Doing the presentations allows me to provide some teaching and I always learn something from the club members.