Planting up

The fun part.

Actually the fun part was seeing all the beautiful – and beautifully grown plants – for the first time.

Here is the order from the wonderful Filippi plant nursery near Montpellier in the way far south almost in the sea south of France.

They were delivered to the Peugeot garage in the nearest town as it’s on a main road. And saves being shrieked at by delivery drivers in their huge trucks, stuck on our narrow roads.

I popped up Wednesday afternoon to collect them. And then lovingly gazed and tried to familiarize myself with a lot of these plants.

There are new things for me: centaurea bella, trifolium something or other (I’ll check that – Erodium trifolium). Three achilleas I’ve never planted – nobilis, umbellata and coarctata.

Actually I have achlllea nobilis all over the farm. It’s a wild one that spreads merrily.

But at a small cost (we are ignoring the expensive freight charges) I have 15 well grown little plants that ought to romp away.

The stachys cretica looks like sage, and euphorbia rigida looks like it came from outer space. I’m very excited about those.  I have been driving past them on a roundabout near Valence for ten years now and always admire them.

(Sorry you have no pics, for some reason I can’t upload. I’ll add them once the website has settled down after five minutes on the naughty st ep.)

I had done all my notes about flowering and groundcover capabilities. And whether they could tolerate the shade of pine trees. So the laying out took about half an hour.

Except of course I will tinker. The three perovskia blue spires aren’t staying where I placed them.  They need something a bit higher above them to really look fun.

Right now I have them above and around some salvias – pretty blue flowering sage guaranteed to minus 15C in temperature.  But they look wrong.

But apart from that I felt good to go.

The ground is still solidly compacted and hard.  It was mattock work to get the areas dug out around the plants.  And as I plant each little shrub in a shallow bowl so I can water deeply, this job took ages.

In fact it took a whole afternoon to plant up just 22 plants.

Argh. I’m on a deadline as I have to head out on Sunday. So there was a minor panic Thursday when I realized that I could only devote half a day to planting.  House guests, pool leak investigation, market, shopping, chores…

And then there was the tick list of all the wild animals who visit this space: wild boar, deer, badgers, hares.

That solution will have to wait until the weekend. I’m too busy madly planting.