Winter Snow

The main event of winter 2007/08 was the heavy snowfall on the evening of 3rd January 2008 which saw most of Belfast blanketed in 4 to 6 inches of snow in a couple of hours. This Chamaerops was pictured early in the night. By morning many of the lower fronds of Chamaerops and Trachycarpus were bent under the weight of snow and remained that way after the thaw.

Elsewhere the weigh of snow broke branches of trees and felled some small trees - very evident along the Lagan River where the towpath was blocked in places by fallen trees.

An Aloe Hardy to -10°C

This Aloe can survive most of what the UK/Irish climate can throw at it! Cold, wet & drought, even prolonged frosts down to -10°C. Even if defoliated, the chances are it will grow again from its semi-woody stems or from below ground level .... and it grows fast!

Aloe striatula

The orange flower spikes are a bonus in summer. (This one was severely cut back in early summer 2007 and didn't produce any flowers this year.) Another essential plant for the exotic garden. Easy to root from cuttings.

Rare Puya chilensis flowers after 17 years

The rear garden is smaller than the front and more difficult to capture in one photograph. I have to start with one plant (pictured) which flowered earlier this summer, some 17 years after it was purchased as a seedling, on a visit to Tresco in the Scilly Isles - It was sold as Puya chilensis:-

The other spectactular flowering plant in spring/early summer is Beschorneria yuccoides which is also visible in the photograph (the red stemmed flower spikes).

The Puya was kept in a container for several years and planted outdoors in the spring of 2001, in this relatively sheltered position. I threw a blanket over it on very frosty nights but it did suffer some damage on occasions where the temperature dropped to -7°C or below. I would not consider it to be reliably hardy, except in the mildest areas of the UK and Ireland. I have been very lucky to get it to flowering size and am claiming this as a first for Northern Ireland! (But, it seems, not the first in Ireland! .....see http://lindienaughton.blogspot.com/2007/06/help-what-is-this-plant.html)

Coming back to the present, this is another shot of the rear garden showing Yucca gloriosa tricolor, Musa basjoo, Cordyline parryi purpurea, among others.

I intend to deal with individual plants in subsequent entries but the star at the moment has to be Fascicularia bicolor. There are several of them flowering in the garden at the moment and one is just visible in the bottom right of the above photograph (& close up below). This is a pretty tough, bromeliad which is native to Chile and has survived prolonged severe frosts (as low as -11°C) in 1995 and 2000/01. The leaf bracts of flowering plants turn an intense scarlet colour in late summer but the flower itself is a little bluish cone at the centre of the rosette.

Fascicularias tend to take on a tussocky appearance after a few years and do benefit from being divided regularly. Also the offsets root quite easily in spring/summer. The only problem is that the leaves are edged with little spiny hooks which will cover your hands with scratches if you don't wear gloves.

So, that is my recommended plant for today - Fascicularia bicolor. (They used to be hard to obtain but much easier to find these days - B & Q were selling them earlier this year!)

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Hardy Exotics: The Tropics Move North!

My interest in experimenting with sub-tropical plants and 'hardy exotics' took off in 1983 & 1984 which were relatively hot summers in Northern Ireland and gave a (false) feeling of a mediterranean climate.

I was aware at this stage that we could grow Cordylines in Northern Ireland , that they would be cut down by frosts but that were also capable of regrowing from ground level. The next 'discoveries' were that there were some Yuccas which were totally hardy in our climate and even one palm 'Trachycarpus fortunei'! There followed an explosion of possibilities and experimentation with plants grown from seed or imported from specialist nurseries in Cornwall and elsewhere in England. (Sources were very limited at that time). Many plants died in our cold wet winters but others survived and we left our first house in January 1994, with a garden full of well established Trachycarpus palms, Chamaerops humilis, Cordyline australis and the more exotic C. indivisa, yuccas, bottle brushes, astleia, some hardy cactus, etc.

Anyway, this blog is more to do with the garden in our current house in the South Belfast area, Northern Ireland and to demonstrate that even in a small urban garden it is possible to cram in a lot of exotic plants and create a sub-tropical effect.

I'll finish this introduction with a picture of the front garden taken a few days ago.