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Even as winter prepares to loosen its grip, Frank finds himself worrying about the tender plants that might not survive its final blast
What’s coming up in March
It is a dangerous time for the somnolent. Warm days and lengthening days will have them stirring in their stores and there will be a great temptation, after months of mean trickles that kept the soil just this side of dust, to give everything a good drenching. Leaves are crisp, stems are withered; tubers and rhizomes shrivel with every passable day. Those salvias look as though they are past saving, and some of them are, but the best chance of the survivors is that you keep your head well into March. We may be about to have our coldest weather.
I freely admit, as an enthusiastic lover of the tender, that my overwintering skills could be improved. For the last few years I’ve been off the hook, able to blame my absence (in a frost-free climate, to add insult to immunity) for any fatality. Now I am back to having myself to blame, and the stalwart remnants weigh on my conscience. Any fool can get a tender plant through the first half of winter. That is when they are shutting down and conserving with unconsciousness. It is these last days that count, when you have to manage the slow awakening. If I can kill, with care, the things that survived my neglect, am I any kind of gardener at all?
What is there that has brazened out the exile? There is no aloe left out of a huge selection, not even the supposedly tough A. polyphylla. There are few stenches more distressing than that of a rotten aloe (the putrid core of a large agave, perhaps), and I have laid them all to compost, one by several. Pelargoniums have waltzed through the wilderness years undiminished. They are the cockroaches of the tender plant world. Aeoniums have a lovely knack of dying from the neck down, but leaving microcephalous rosettes that can be coaxed into regeneration. Some cannas and some dahlias, in no particular pattern, have elected to stay this side of survival, just. There are opuntias that put a brave face on it to begin with but are now no more than hazardous waste.
No salvia chose life, but that was not a great surprise: in the cosseting days they were among the most temperamental, always succumbing to the lies of February: it was one of the great tasks of March to wrestle the emergency cases out of the clutches of Kharon, snipping in hopes of a green exposure beneath the blackened dust. And that was when I had a greenhouse, swathed in bubble-wrap and belted and braced by several frost-watch heaters. Thinking about it now, that greenhouse was so crowded that only the rotting microbes could survive. Had I been less greedy and had given the few plants that really counted more air, the result might have been improved.
Now there is only a corner of the boot room, where dahlias and cannas are stacked in their pots; various windowsills where odd things have strange tenancies, and a glazed porch on the front of the house where one of each of the favourite pelargoniums has a guaranteed slot. I should be happy with that. I am trying to be less intensive, but the lure of an old addiction is a sweet song. My friend Kate has just moved to a place down the road, with outbuildings that are more than her poultry ambitions can exploit. She had made shelters for the tender, with proper, grown-up, air-circulating heaters that look like jet engines and is happily overwintering salvias beneath, elbows not touching at all. I am jealous.
How nice it is to have something to worry about that is not in the gift of a demagogue or an official or a deity; that is not a matter of life or death to people you should care about more. How soothing to be kept awake at night by the survival of a tender rarity you could replace with a manageable effort. How good is it to be watchful again.
ANY FOOL CAN GET A TENDER PLANT THROUGH THE FIRST HALF OF WINTER. IT IS THESE LAST DAYS THAT COUNT, WHEN YOU HAVE TO MANAGE THE SLOW AWAKENING