Tuesday 19 May 2015

Marc de la Torre, Box growers gird your loins, box rust, teeny weeny incy wincy and Coop typo.



New posts announced  on twitter @pwhorticulture 



I was preparing a talk on my time at Bourton House  recently when I dug out this picture. It goes back some  25 or so years  and is still a favourite of mine. The  ceramic pot is by Mark de la Torre - a man who does not like to stand still and who has a vast creative energy which he sends off in all directions. His partner Clare  and son Luis  are  also stoked full of the craft maker's urge to design and create. To appreciate the   broad spectrum of this trio's capabilities and how much imagination and ingenuity can be crammed into  one household go take a look at their work at http://www.delatorre.co.uk/index.html
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I have bought a new camera  and somehow managed  to set it to black and white and took a few pictures  before I noticed. I  am glad  I got the settings wrong  because I think this black and white  picture says a lot more than the colour version below. Shapes and shadows become much more important. 
More of this garden  even belower.


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Teeny Weeny Incy Wincys



Startled baby spiders scurrying up and down their  webs to escape predation


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Flower of an unknown succulent plant

Yet  another  flower of an anonymous succulent with my grubby mit  looking like it is made of wood.

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Box Rust



I was cutting back some  box  plants a few weeks ago and spotted these  little black blobs. Turns out they are the  spore producing  pustules of  Box Rust, Puccinia buxi. They  appear in autumn and  persist through winter  to spring. They did not appear to  be harming the plant  and nor were they particularly disfiguring. No treatment necessary. 

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Box growers gird your loins.


No matter how tight you clip your box  hedging  sooner or later it will creep  beyond a size that is suitably balanced and  proportional and there comes a time  when loins  have to be girded, bullets bitten  and a bit of serious  clipping embarked upon.  Sometimes it takes a  client with  a bit of nerve  and a degree of blind faith to take the leap  and  start the process of regeneration.  Fortunately I have such a client who can see  beyond the immediate and  relying on my previous experience of successfully renovating  overgrown box plants  we started clipping  If you look at the pictures below you will see a bit of before and after  and see  we have been quite drastic. In fact  now my only concern is that we have not been drastic  enough  and we might end up with some dead  twigs  with a  base of  fresh  shoots on the long low sections of the hedge. 
We did this in mid April.   










The weapon of choice. 
The clippings catcher  proves mighty useful when it comes to tidying up. 


As scary as it all was  there was a reassuring  number of shoots already sprouting  in the  depths of the old twigs.  


I guess these tiny shoots would have withered if they had not been given the light that  cutting back offered them,

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Spot the typo on this packet of Coop hot cross buns.


Yes I know I should get out more.
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Aaaah, how cute.  - that's cynicism by the way. 


It is one of the Silkweeds, Asclepia speciosa I think, parachuting its seeds into the wind..