Seeds, success and plundering pigeons...

We re-open this week! For Opening times and visitor offers scroll to the end.

I adore Pachyphragma macrophyllum (there, what an off-putting start to a blogpost- straight in with the ‘Latin’…). If it has a common name I don’t know it, apologies.

It has the crispest, cleanest white flowers and flowers in March at knee height, just when we are otherwise reliant on low flowering bulbs or blossom for colour. I’ve planted drifts of it in our woodland shade garden and in most years it creates a froth of eye-catching white in the dappled shade of the emerging larch.

Not so this year… Every time I walk past a pair of plundering pigeons are in there, nonchalantly feasting on the flowers and the glossy green leaves. All that is left is a ragged mat of bitten foliage.

This is how it should look….

The destruction of this lovely plant is annoying, of course (and I wouldn’t mind so much if pigeons were worth sacrificing it for…), but what’s really maddening is that this type of plant is precisely why people come here and to nurseries like ours - you can’t buy this plant at garden centres. We collect the seed from these parent plants and raise new stock from it each year, in a two year cycle. Will I get some seed, any seed now? I don’t know - it might re-flower once the pigeons have moved on.

Like so many other plants we grow, the seeds need a spell of cold temperatures before they will germinate, so we mix the freshly collected seed with a handful of damp vermiculite, tie it in a plastic bag and put it in the fridge for the winter. We have a small fridge in the nursery for just that purpose. If that’s not an option for you, just shove them in the veg section in the bottom of your fridge and ignore them until February.

In February, we half-fill seed trays or small pots with compost then spread the seed/vermiculite mix on top and put them somewhere cool under cover. Works like magic. So while I’m mourning the loss of our Pachyphragma display, thousands of new seedlings are coming through from seed I collected last year.

Top left clockwise: emerging seedlings of Pachyphragma macrophyllum, Lunaria rediviva, Peucedanum verticillare and Ligusticum scoticum. All have spent the winter in the fridge and sown three weeks ago. Great to see, isn’t it?

It’s also prime seed sowing season now for almost all of our other perennials that don’t need chilling. Just a few of the seeds we’ve sown this week include Dianthus cruentus, Lychnis coronaria, Knautia macedonica, Valeriana officinalis and Verbena bonariensis, A few of these will grow fast enough to sell in 9cm pots later this year, but apart from the Verbena, all of these will flower for the first time in 2025, from seed collected in 2023. A huge part of running a nursery is continuously thinking ahead two years or more. If I often seem distracted (guilty as charged), maybe my head is somewhere in the future….

I’ve linked the names to the plant on our website - they’re not all in stock, but you can at least see what they’ll look like when the do flower.

Talking of what’s in flower now….

This is Bergenia ‘Overture’ - isn’t it a cracker?

The nursery, gardens and tea room re-open on Wednesday 27th March - in two days time! We are slowly bringing new stock out but the vast majority of our plants are still behind the scenes. It takes time to properly label everything and bring out onto our customer benches. So if you are coming to visit, do have a look at the webshop first and perhaps bring a list of plants you’d like to see.

Garden entry will be free this week (Wed-Sat) and there are some excellent multi-buy offers - all 9cm perennials priced at £5.00 are 3 for £12.00 and some (Primroses and Primulas) are 3 for £10.00. The weather forecast is iffy, of course, but the heater will be on in the tea room - it will be great to see you.

Opening hours over Easter: 29th March, Good Friday, open 10-5. 30th March, Easter Saturday, open 10-5. Easter Sunday, closed. Easter Monday, closed.

Happy gardening :-)

Sue