Back in stock, but only just...

You probably can’t imagine how pleased we are to see this flower in our polytunnel.

We know it as Osteospermum ‘Deep Pink Form’, though it’s not at all clear that that’s its correct name – there are several remarkably similar looking cultivars listed in RHS Plant Finder, so a bit of botanical detective work might be useful to see which is which, or even if the different named plants are actually different.

But anyway – we’ve grown this plant for a long time, probably selling thousands over the years, and they’ve all been propagated from a single plant which was originally a gift from Nick’s mum, maybe 25 years ago, so it has a certain sentimental as well as financial value.

The usual routine on the nursery with vegetatively propagated plants is that the parent plants are renewed each year, by discarding or selling the older ones, and keeping back half a dozen of the most recently prop’d specimens to provide next years cuttings.   Simple enough you’d think, and of course it is, as long as you keep parents and progeny apart, and only sell the ones that you’re supposed to sell.    This year somehow we managed to break this golden rule, and the cry of consternation that went up when we realised we’d sold ALL our stock was audible for miles around.

No stock, at all, of one of the first plants that Barlow Nurseries ever propagated or sold.   Arghghgh!

But there is, of course, a happy ending.   One of the pleasures of running a small nursery is that we know a huge proportion of our customers personally, and thanks to Louise’s elephantine memory, we knew at least one garden where some of the last batch of these plants had gone.   And we knew they’d been acquired to enliven a garden that was opening for charity in a few weeks time, so a deal was struck – we supplied some plants for their plant stall, and in return, were allowed to take a few cuttings of the Osteospermum.

So all’s well that ends well – well, we hoped so, but weren’t very confident.   It was mid-summer, hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks, the plants had been planted at the foot of some very hungry and thirsty conifers, and we were there at midday.   If you had to describe a scenario from which cuttings were least likely to succeed, this would have to be a strong contender.   But we were desperate, pressed on regardless, and as sometimes happens, the plants confounded us.

We managed to find 18 shoots which looked as if they just might make viable cuttings, carried them back to the nursery as if they were gold dust, and got them onto the propagating bench in double quick time.   And remarkably from 18 cuttings, we’ve now got 18 plants, the first of which to flower is shown in the picture.

So Osteospermum ‘Deep Pink Form’ lives on at Barlow Nurseries, and stocks WILL be available in spring 2010!

Plant finder lists them as H3-4, although we find them reliably hardy, they form an attractive mat of narrow mid-green foliage, and flower their socks off from june until the frosts tell them to take a break.   Cut back hard in the following spring, they’ll do it all again, and again, and again.  Easy, reliable, very floriferous, an absolute front-of-border beauty.  We haven’t grown it for 25 years for nothing!

No 3 in our infinite series…

How did this beauty fall out of cultivaton ?

Those good people at Plant Heritage (I always liked the altogether more descriptive, if less succinct  ‘National Council for the Conservation of plants and Gardens’) run a conservation scheme aimed at bringing rare plants back into cultivaton.    Usually they are simply plants that have been “forgotten” in the tidal waves of new plant introductions that seem to engulf garden centres these days.

Aster Louise is one such “forgotten” plant which we’ve been growing for a couple of years now – and it really doesn’t deserve to have slipped below gardener’s radar.   It’s lovely late season colour (those in the picture are on our sales benches right now) very floriferous, and most importantly of all, seems completely mildew resistant.   It grows to maybe 18 inches tall, and planted now, each one will be an impresive 18 inch wide clump in the  border this time next year.  As a bonus, they’re wildlife friendly too – today they’ve been smothered in Comma butterflies making the most of the autumn sunshine.

You won’t find this beauty in many nurseries, but look out for it – sometimes the oldies are the best !

Autumn sunshine!

No 2 in our series stretching to infinity…….

If you want a bit of autumn colour in your border, look no further!    We’ve grown the “brand leader” Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ for years, but never really found it happy on the nursery;  just one of those plants that never seems to thrive in a pot, always a bit sulky, and always goes down with a very disfiguring leaf spot.   So how pleased were we when we tried R. deamii instead!?

Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii is a little taller than R. ‘Goldsturm’ (although encyclopedias often list them both the same at 60 – 100 cms) but other than that they’re pretty much indistinguishable.   The big advantage is that R. deamii just seems to be a much happier plant!    Always vigorous, healthy and very floriferous.   Those in the picture are actually on our sales area right now (although we have some in the garden too).

It also has the RHS Award of Garden Merit, which means it’s an all round good do-er, so if you want a splash of mid/back-of-border sunshine, these are the boys!

Pool digging, end day 1

After a few days hiatus in which life, and the sordid business of earning a living intervened, we’re back on the garden pool project, and we’ve been digging today.   We’re using as large a digger as we could get through the Lych Gate (the only entrance to the garden) but it’s dawning on us now that this really is quite a big pond.   Even with some really very nice mechanical assistance (Caterpillar model 301.6C for the digger geeks amongst you) it’s going to take a few days.

Our biggest worry now is that the spoil produced isn’t actually going to be enough to contour all the surrounding borders in the way we’d planned, and we might have to buy some extra topsoil…

Hang on, there's a bit more space there....

With September comes the final plant selling outing of the year – Louise is off to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire very early in the morning, for their Autumn Plant Fair.     Chatsworth is a fantastic place, glorious gardens and spectacular landscaping;   it’s difficult to imagine just how wealthy the family who built it must have been – presumably in the Bill Gates league in their day.   One of Chatsworth’s own history leaflets says, perhaps a little coyly, that the first Earl of Devonshire “prospered as one of King Henry VIII’s commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries” so you can draw your own conclusions about exactly how his fortune was amassed, and how many monasteries equals a stately country pile….

Unfortunately, Chatsworth is a long way from here – easily the most distant plant fair at which we sell, and preparing for the September event (there is also a spring plant fair, in April) generates heaps of angst about whether we can get enough stock into our trailer to make the trip worthwhile.

The spring fair is easy, because all the plants are small and we can pack loads in – plants in September are bigger!   Anyway, we usually pull it off, more or less, and the picture shows the end result.

All we have to do now is hope that the sun shines, and that the plants go home with customers, and don’t come home with Louise!

No 1 in an infinite series

Caryopteris x clandonensis Worcester Gold

Caryopteris x clandonensis ‘Worcester Gold’

A plant that needs a sunny spot, and a free draining soil – which is why its looking pretty wonderful in our garden right now I guess – it’s in a south facing border, in an elevated position in our very free draining soil, so it must be pretty much perfectly located.   The yellow foliage is striking in its own right, but when its topped with its lovely lavender blue flowers, its a cracker!

It only grows to about 1 mt wide and 1.5 mts high so it will fit in even the most modestly sized border , and it has the RHS Award  of Garden Merit, meaning its an all round good do-er.

Have you got one in your garden ?

Okay, we may not be up to the literary or gardening standards of Margery Fish, but we’re going through a similar process, and we’re sure she won’t mind us borrowing her muse….

So here we go, autumn project in-play, and the garden development begins with marking out the new borders, and the new pool.  The picture shows a length of ever reliable Tricoflex hose marking out the perimeter of our new water feature.   All we need now is a man with a mini-digger, and we’re off!

Our embryonic garden pool

The pool will be about 3 feet deep in the middle, with ledges around the edge about 18 inches wide and deep, so we’ll have capacity for both shallow and deep water aquatic plants.   A good proportion of the water will be in the shade of the adjacent weeping willow, and with a few strategically placed water lillies to shade the depths still further, we’re hoping to avoid the dreaded pea soup syndrome with which so many garden ponds  seem to suffer.   Watch this space!

The excavated soil will be used to grade the contours of the surrounding garden, and re-bury some of the willow roots which are currently half exposed, so we’re hoping not to have to move too much soil too far.

There’ll be a bog garden on the side of the pool opposite the willow, approximately in the area where you can currently see the remains of a decades worth of bonfires, with a nice big Gunnera, and a few other choice marginals around it, and then more conventional shrub and herbaceous plantings around that.

A bit of decking and a jetty…hmmm, still in development…

The mounds of foiliage showing in the bottom right of the photo are butternut squash, probably the most vigorous veg we’ve ever grown – each plant is already consuming about 4 square metres of ground, and they’re still growing.   This area was designated “temporary veg plot” while the pool plan was hatched.   This area, and the area currently down to grass between this and the soon-to-be bog garden will be planted up with a good wide shrub and perennial border.   Next season the veg will move to their permanent home in an area off to the right of the picture (more of which later – probably much later).

Our soil is phenomenally free draining sand (dig down 18 inches and it really is pure orange building sand) so we’re going to have to use a butyl liner – lets hope we don’t regret our decision to have a “good sized” pool when we come to buy that!

Oh, and the new borders mentioned above are out of the picture to the left.   But that’s for another day.

After prevaricating through last season we’ve bitten the bullet and decided that we don’t need both our huge Ifor Williams box van trailers.   They’ve served us very well over the years, but changes in the plant fair circuit, and our own attempts to refocus our business on sales direct from the nursery, mean that we’re selling more from home, and less  away, so we’ve sold one of the big trailers.

All the best, old fella....

We’ve learned a couple of things – Ifor Williams trailers go on forever (we’ve had ours seven years, and they’re really not showing any significant wear) and they depreciate really slowly – we sold at 80% of what we paid for it, which means its cost us £700 over seven years.   If we’d bought a van of similar capacity it would be well on its way to the scrap yard by now, and would have cost many £000’s more.

And so we’re going to buy a new one – our tree business continues to flourish, and we’ve actually refused sales this season on some of the big specimen trees we have on the nursery because we had no way of delivering them.   We’d never actually intended to sell them, we just wanted to let customers see what the smaller trees would look like a few years after they’d bought them…. but we’re not in the business of refusing sales, so we’re effectively “swapping” an old trailer for a new flatbed one that should handle trees of maybe 25 feet tall – probably as big as you’d want to go without having to resort to a crane to plant it.

Here’s to the new tree season!

The bare root season starts in November, so if you’re thinking of adding a tree to your garden, talk to us soon.