Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
General Subjects => General Forum => Topic started by: mark smyth on December 01, 2007, 05:59:57 PM
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I was told recently I shouldnt be growing the Cyclamen persicum hybrids/cultivars/colour selections but I think they are fantastic and really brighten an otherwise dull glass house.
Do you agree?
Is there a plant you wouldnt grow?
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A bat-plant, maybe? ;D ;D ;D
Zephirine
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There are lots of plants I wouldn't grow Mark but I have no problems with other people growing them, if they're what those people like. Plant (or any kind of) snobbery is so silly. I accept quite happily that my tastes may be different from yours or Maggi's or Carlo's or David's. What does it matter? Grow what you like, and enjoy it.
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Oh Zephirine, the bat plant (Tacca chantieri) is SPECTACULR!
I have added a picture for you Carlo. :) BD
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Oh yes, it is indeed, Carlo...
It's just way too sophisticated for my greenhouse and me!
(it was also just a way to, hopefully, bring a smile on our local Batman's face! ;D)
Zephirine
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;D
I'm not worried about comments just wondering what you wouldnt grow
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Mark,
I'm sure I have grown each and every form of unfashionable flower that I could lay my hands on by now and even when/if I have come to dislike a plant and would not ever grow it again I still can say that I have enjoyed growing them at the time. Like you I have several cyclamen persicum cultivars growing at the moment and find them great to give colour at this time of year.
What would I not grow? The "Four o' Clock Plant" - what is its 'official' name? Can't recollect at the moment. Well, I grew this in great number and profusion, initially from seed collected on the strands of the south of Spain while on holidays, but eventually grew tired of it, really tired of it.
Those fibrous-rooted begonias, common in summer planting schemes would certainly not find a place in my garden, though I have grown them and, you know, may well grow them again sometime but not at present. Those old fashioned red geraniums beloved of my grandparents - never to be welcomed here again.
Ah, it's all a matter of fashion and taste and these are changing and transient things and oncoming old age allows me to comment that I have seen some of these fashions come and go and come again and think it is of no importance. The only fashion that is worth adhering to is that one which says you should grow the plants which you enjoy and which give you pleasure.
There's my pennyha'worth now.
Paddy
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There are a few plants I have difficulty in liking mainly because I associate them with municipal type planting. In particular, from the UK Hypericum and from Portugal Nerium oleander (motorway central reserve plant here!) and Canna.
I grow garden centre cyclamens too!
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On one occasion a few years ago, some alpine gardening friends visited my garden in Newcastle, and one of them took me aside and told me that if I was to be considered a serious rock gardener, I shouldn't be growing roses! I've always grown a few - they give much needed colour and scent to the garden at a time when many of the other plants I grow are past flowering: and in any case, my grandad used to grow and show them, and my wife loves them. So there!! Needless to say, I was a little less than impressed.
Many of the plants I wont grow now are those that I've experimented with in the past, or accepted as gifts from well-meaning friends and which have turned out to be rampant invaders of space and have proved difficult to eradicate: one example that comes to mind is the poached-egg plant (name escapes me)....... and there's Meconopsis cambrica, which I really like, but I can NEVER succeed in removing all the pods before they shed seed........
Oh, I nearly forgot. .. Mark, the hybrid Cyclamen are fabulous, wonderful range of colours.
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Florist's cyclamen is one I avoid, not just because I don't like them (well, most of them), but because there isn't really anywhere suitable within my house, garden etc. Too dull, too hot or too cold and I certainly wouldn't waste any of my precious space in the greenhouse. I much prefer species of anything. Even the big blousey hybrid cyps are secondary to the wee species in my eyes.
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There is really nothing that I would not try growing at least once, if time or space or hardiness allowed---but life is short---so I do tend to concentrate on hardy plants.
I have always felt that gardening in my very cold climate was a great blessing---as it at least ensured a weeding out of possibilities. I will never be able to get close to sampling more than a pinch of all I could possibly grow here, even after a lifetime of gardening obsessively. As it says below "....so many species....so little time"
I suppose the plant snobs believe they will live forever....
Kristl
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I don't consider that there are plants that I don't like, and wouldn't grow for this reason...I'd rather say that I'm not attracted by some, that's all!
Most of the spectacular exotics, for example, just don't appeal to me...I find them beautiful allright, but they just don't arise any emotion...
Spiky things (except roses) don't either...
Bright reds usually don't thrill me either, even though I love carmine for example.
I don't think it's snobbery, just personal taste!
Like for music...
I often think that gardening is just some kind of botanical music, creating a new bed is like writing a new partition...and the effect, the emotion it raises depends on the person who interprets it, on the acoustic/visual environment, and on the sensitivity of the person who listens to/looks at it on a particular moment...
Exotics would be my own, personal "J.S.Bach" probably...and spiky things my Heavy Metal ::)
Zephirine, 100% kinesthesic I'm afraid...
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It's not really snobbery, but a sorting out -
A friend who grew a lot of alpines, including ones like silverswords
from Hawaii, started to grow orchids when he was in his mid-70s.
He built a greenhouse adjoining his house, and filled it with orchids.
I was about thirty at the time, madly collecting rhododendrons and iris.
I read some of his orchid journals and discovered how vast this subject
is, and how addictive it could be. A bit frightening. I decided to grow no
orchids at all until I was old. I'm approaching 70, so I suppose I could start
now, but as Kristl says "so many species, so little time" or is it "so little space"?
And I am still finding new hardy plants I haven't grown yet - all thanks to
that table tennis game that opened China to the West.
I may yet get started with orchids, but not till I am REALLY old.
My friend lived to be 100. There's time.
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From personal choice we don't grow beddings or roses. I hope that isn't snobbery as I have no problem with them in other gardens. I suppose snobbery could come in when I say that I 'hate' to see animals and such like constructed from plants in public gardens - bear in mind that I live in Britain In Bloom regular winner, Forres, where the claim to fame is just such structures :'(.
A few years ago we bough some of the B&Q mini cyclamen and collected seed, for the fun of it. I now have a tray full of corms with a variety of leaf forms and some have flower buds. They dont survive in the garden but even if they did I would probably keep them as a 'front porch' plant.
What is strange in this household is that we love the various moth orchids in the house but don't like pleonies because they are too blowsey. Maybe someone can convince us otherwise!
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annuals fill my garden during the summer. I plant 200 of one type - the S.A. Arctotis - that are still looking good. They have to come out because bulbs are already poking up
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My motto is, "if you like it and can grow it, do so" . I have seen so-called alpines which should be grown as a challenge to your cultivation skills. A lot of these have looked like wayside weeds to me. I have often thought that our common daisy, if suddenly introduced from the Himalayas, would receive rave notices. It can survive almost any weather and soil conditions and is one of the earliest to flower, repeating until late Autumn. Yet plant snobs regard it as a pernicious weed
On one of the TV gardening programs this year, I heard that Irises were the must have plant of the year. I didn't realise that I was such a trend setter. Like my wardrobe, I am in fashion about every ten tears.
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Thank God we don't all like the same plants - imagine how boring it would be if every garden you visited looked the same! For me annuals are just too much like hard work and the resulting mass of colour would look out of place in our garden. Prior to our passion for alpine plants we had a cottage garden complete with roses, lavender, delphiniums and lots of other large and colourful perennials... slowly but surely they all went!
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Itīs nothing wrong with any plant if just the spot is right. I have grown Dahlias, Begonias, Annuals and Roses and I liked them then. Now I have problem to find a spot for them in the garden.
At the moment I like it barren. Just rocks and grit, not to much colour. Even a Lewisia tweedyi could be to much in some beds.
But the pink Dandelion is nice in the selling area.
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That sounds a bit like the garden I visited at Holmfirth 26 years ago. It could have been Geoff Rollinson's. There was a beautifully built stone wall, very long and quite tall, and inserted into a tiny hole there was a single very small plant of, if I remember rightly, Androsace alpina, just that, nothing more in many square metres of stone work. The premise was that the proportion of plant to rock was about the same as in the wild, so this was genuine "alpine" gardening. Something like that anyway. As the song says, "great work if you can get it" but most of us haven't the space for such idiocies.
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Aha, your pink dandelion much more better than mine. Do you get seed Peter?
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I'm in for seed on the dandelion too! Very nice. I've had T. pamiricum in the past (and hopefully in seed ex lots this year) and also grow one here with red in the leaves (name escapes me at the moment). I'd love to have a good pink for lectures, teaching garden, etc.
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I'll hopefully be buying the red leaved, T. faeroense, over the winter
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Lesley
I would like to have it like that. A big rockgarden with only a few plants, but thatīs impossible. I want to grow everything so I have to plant a lot in every bed. But I try to make different environment where the plants can grow in a natural mess. I often plants a lot of each.
And as you can see, it would look very strange with Begonias etc. in a bed like this.
I get a lot of seed on the Taraxacum. Itīs not weedy, never appears in the lawn and it donīt like competition. But i donīt think I have collected any this year. I have only sowing a few fresh seeds for the nursery.
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Hi Peter,
from your last pictures it appears that you've completed yet another section of your garden and have moved half a mountainside to do it!
I hope you'll show us pics of it as it developes. I'd love to come and see it again in person in another year or two, or when the budget allows!
cheers
fermi
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Many of the plants I wont grow now are those that I've experimented with in the past, or accepted as gifts from well-meaning friends and which have turned out to be rampant invaders of space and have proved difficult to eradicate: one example that comes to mind is the poached-egg plant (name escapes me).......
Limnanthes douglasii ?
There is a patch of it in garden under the shade of a tree and it seems well behaved. I have not tried to get rid of it though!
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Thanks, Andrew it is the name I was looking for. I think you are lucky, because it likes damp, even wet conditions. The garden where I grew this plant was on heavy boulder clay, very water retentive, so it really enjoyed life to the full.
Peter, I do like the pink dandelion, Taraxacum pseudoroseum. These are real alpines. Pic 1 was snapped in the upper Turken Aksu (pic 2) in the Tien Shan (Kyrgystan) at 1800+m. And, just look what it was growing with: yes it is snow-in-summer - Cerastium cerastioides! Now just let that get a hold in the garden.......