Rogue Lily

When we moved into this house in 2007 and I started the garden the North facing border was planted with hot colours.  It has probably undergone more than one change of heart since then but I am still stuck with the rogue red poppy which appears every year and I have now learned to live with it and admire its tenacity.  This summer, incredibly, a rogue orange day lily appeared.  I assume it must have come from a bulblet which has taken five years to mature into a bulb large enough to produce a flowering plant.  I took pity on it and moved it to the new narrow border at the front of the house.  I intended to plant it with perrrenials next year.  It already had annuals struggling away in it and I needed to spend my hard-earned on the new back border.  As soon as it went in I knew it would drive me crackers sitting there on its lonesome.

Off we tootled to Boscow Nurseries (Little lever) to stoke up on plants.  I have visited this nursery for as long as I've lived in Bury - over thirty years.  I always knew it, and still refer to it as,  Margaret Gill's.  She had the stall on Bury market which was the other regular shopping place for me.  They are still there and so is the nursery, though sadly without Margaret.

Originally the plant material  was pretty much home-grown as they were a working nursery.  This meant the plants were hardy enough to survive my Lancashire garden, unlike some of the soft, sappy, Dutch imported stuff you buy in other places.  I am not sure this is as true these days BUT they certainly do get hardened off in our climate.  The plants are perhaps not as well kept as they once were - a bit weedy and sometimes under-watered.  I do wonder when I say this if that is actually true - have we just got used to the shiny sterilised imported under cover grown stuff we see everywhere?  A bit like the difference between supermarket veg and your own grown stuff, complete with holes and dirt and dead bits.

Any way enough nit-picking.  On the whole it is still a great place to buy your plants.  I got 52 perrenials for £68 where else can you do that?  This included two lovely healthy jasmine ready to scramble up my trellis arch.   Optimist!  After my other half dug out a pile of hard core I added a couple of handfuls of potting compost and a sprinkling of bone meal and they will have to take their chances.  It can't be any worse than growing them in a pot.  Here's hoping the roots can find their way out of their grim surroundings and into something they like.  The other plant incidentally is the second year of the spectacular twenty-foot Lady Boothby climbing fuschia... mmmmmm???

Twenty-eight of the plants went into the new narrow border at the front of the house to back up the solitary day lily, which is where this story began.  Talk about sheer genius/canny instinct on my part, when I walked round gathering up stuff for front and back borders I was just picking right colour, right size, right price with no thought to number of plants as I expected to add to them at some time.  Not so, twenty-eight was exactly the right amount for the space I had.  Job done.

To emphasise the value of shopping at Gills, several of the pots held plants such as coreopsis, crocosmia and day lilies which would easily split into half a dozen reasonable size plants.  I didn't do this as I want them to get away fast and hopefully completely fill the border next summer.

The other twenty-four went on to start the new border in the back garden.