The ghosts of plants past

Does this ever happen to you? You’re sorting through some old empty 3L pots, looking to pot something on – and you come across one with its original sales label. It’s a dicentra alba and you think to yourself: ‘whatever happened to that…?’ Followed by, ‘I don’t ever remember buying a dicentra alba’.

It’s quite typical that my use and re-use of pots goes on for much longer than the plant itself, and in a way my collection of miscellaneous plant pots is like an unreliable gardening memoir. There are some pots in the collection that have been around for 15 years – a time in which I’ve moved twice - meaning that the original plant could be in one of three locations.

Admittedly a five-year diary is a much better way of recording gardening memories, but taking a look at my pots and their sundry labels is certainly a trip down memory lane. They were picked up in all manner of ways. Some were a pre-planned acquisition, some were an impulse buy at the garden centre or from a plant sales stand at a local fete. A few are still extant, many are no more.

If you take the array of plants I assembled for the photo, they each have a story:

Sollya heterophylla was bought from the RHS plant sales at Wisley. My wife liked the idea of blue flowers in a patio pot. We bought two, one survived, one got frosted. Three cheers for the RHS money back scheme for plants that don’t last two years! Mossy Saxifrage was bought at Squires to go into a rockery we inherited with our current house. It’s still sitting there after two years, looking a bit miserable and wishing it was drier. Two-coloured Muscari is like a cuckoo in the nest. I have no idea where it came from, but suspect the mother-in-law, Hyacinth, brought it round. I have no idea where it is now. Climbing Rose was bought in a three for £10 deal and attracted my eye on the way into Homebase one day, looking for a toilet seat. I put them at the base of three cider apple trees in France hoping they would ramble up into the trees, but instead the cows in the field rambled all over them. I think one may still be clinging on as opposed to climbing. Snake’s Head Fritillary is a plant I absolutely adore. I bought this one at Wisley whilst looking for Iota stone planters and trying very hard not to buy anything else. It was planted at our old house, but I dug it up and took it with us when we moved and it’s thriving in one of our beds. Sedum Autumn Joy is certainly a joy to bees, but not the wife who doesn’t share my enthusiasm for the big varieties of sedum such as ‘bonbon’ and ‘ruby carpet’. I picked one I could instantly divide and gratifyingly both survived. Although, that’s not saying much, I once rooted a sedum cutting from an old wedding flower arrangement that was about to be thrown out. Escallonia Iveyi - not a name to say rapidly – is a shrub I planted in the front border of our last house and is thriving there still.

It’s not just pots, either. I like to keep old polystyrene trays to use for tomato or courgette seeds and they are longer-lived than you might imagine. One in particular stands out, because it was a tray for the trailing lobelia that didn’t want to trail. It said ‘trailing lobelia’ on the side, but no, the plant had other ideas, and spent the whole of the summer resisting the pull of gravity and remaining a perfectly upright lobelia.

I’m sure there is a good reason to take the old sales labels off, but I quite like having them there. Any excuse to stop digging or weeding and take a while to reminisce on the ghosts of plants past. That’s surely a lot of what gardening is about. Plus, I really should get a dicentra, to go with the phlox.