The sad news is, they are at it again.
Who?
The taxonomic botanists of course.
It used to be Senecio greyi, it is now Brachyglottis. What we once called Coleus, is now Solenostemon. Angels Trumpet once known as Datura is now Brugmansia.
Now, here is the latest intelligence, they are to change the names of another group of well-known plants – Michaelmas daisies which most of us know are members of the Aster family as they look like Asters, for goodness sake!
No longer, whilst a few remain un-rechristened, many are now classed as SYMPHYOTRICHUM, but just to confuse us further, only some branches of the family will have that name, some will be EURYBIA and some become AMPELASTERS.
The new names will appear in the 2015 edition of the RHS Plant Finder. According to The Garden magazine of December 2013 these new names are now widely used in North America.
So what!
The real problem of course, under the guise of progress, is the discovery of how to use DNA. There is no living thing safe from DNA but undoubtedly its use has to be classed as progress.
Nevertheless, I will mourn the passing of the old names and the trouble is, learning new words is getting more difficult and they are easily forgotten!
The saving grace and one of the great advantages of the garden centre is that you don’t really need to bother about names as you can just point and say “that’s what I want”.
That said, you still have to read the label to check that the plant is suitable for your garden.
Moving on swiftly …
Let there be light
Here we are into December, a week or two till the shortest day and then happily conditions for our plants start to improve.
I am talking about the quality of light as well as day length.
The latter is easy to quantify but quality/strength/intensity is more difficult to get your head round, as they say.
We know when it is bright or dull.
We know when the light source is stronger from a particular direction because plants will grow towards it (my point last week about turning bulb pots regularly).
The above-ground parts of a plant, the growing point in particular, is described as being positively phototropic – it grows towards the light.
A week or two ago, I told the story of Sid Robertson advising a lady to water her carpet daily to provide humidity for her houseplants.
There was another side to that tale which led to his exasperation.
“Your plants need plenty light,” he said, to which she replied indignantly, “They get plenty light, I have a lovely big oriel window.”
Sid, getting near breaking point, replied: “But yer plants are only getting light from one side, if they were outside or indeed in a glasshouse or conservatory they would be getting light from all sides and from above!”
This train of thought takes me back to the spring of 2012 when we had a cracking spell of weather in March and early April.
Plants were awakening, shaking off the winter blues, just like ourselves and making ready to start into growth with a great deal of pent up energy, then what happened?
Mother Nature switched off the light and turned off the heating.
Cold, wet miserable days ensued, the light levels plummeted.
The reaction of many plants was to elongate the stems. They shot up using that energy already stimulated – searching for the light to fire the system.
There were some very funny looking plants.
Take our potentilla for example. The effect of that weather pattern was to delay flowering but the new young growth grew rapidly looking for better light.
As a result, when the flowers did appear, you could hardly see them for the new growth.
We have a young conifer (a seedling Korean pine) which is naturally a cone shape.
Last year, several of the whorls of branches near the top (it is now about 3m high) shot up, almost overtaking the leading shoot.
Very odd indeed.
What action did I take?
In the case of the potentilla – none, and it has returned to normal this year.
The laterals of the Korean pine were halved in length later in the summer and as I look out at it now, things look to be returning to normal but it is a slow process. That’s conifers for you.