Mother of All Despots posts: 1886 (1/3/01 8:40:37 pm) 165.247.137.80 Reply | Edit | Del All

Indoor/outdoor gardening -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ET

Urban gardener

Elspeth Thompson on the joys of 'indoor/outdoor' gardening

PEOPLE talk a lot about 'indoor/outdoor' gardening these days - by which they usually mean treating the garden as an outdoor room, whose furnishings can be moved inside and outside at will or according to the weather. Plants are seldom included in this equation, even though there is great fun to be had in bringing in garden pots for a spell inside, and introducing cosseted house plants to the great outdoors. You will need to exercise caution. You'll get nowhere by plunging a prize Begonia rex outside on a cold night, and sun-lovers such as lavender won't thank you for being deprived of maximum daylight. No - you have to pick and choose.

This autumn I took the opportunity of the downpours to give my dusty indoor plants an al fresco shower, which they greatly enjoyed. Some house plants - umbrella plants (Cyperus), for instance, and most ferns - positively thrive on a summer in the garden before returning under cover. Frost-tender specimens such as potted pelargoniums and many succulents that spend most of the year in the open must be brought in before winter gets underway. In November and December I enjoy the last extravagant blooms of daturas and brugmansias brought into the sitting-room - and the scent is even more heavenly for being confined by four walls and a ceiling. Many other plants originally intended for the garden can also provide great pleasure if brought inside, and some may even benefit from the experience.

The most obvious candidates at this time of year are small evergreens such as hollies and conifers. My little blue spruce has put on a good two feet since I bought it at the New Covent Garden flower market two Christmases ago. It has been kept in its pot at my London allotment all year, and will be repotted this year after its seasonal spell in the limelight as a Christmas tree.

A bay tree clipped as an obelisk looks great in the hall with a spiral of white fairy lights wound around it; a standard mophead hollybush, provided it is bursting with berries, needs no further adornment. In my experience, none of these plants has been harmed by its sojourn inside - though we do not have our central heating on as much as some people.

If your house is very warm, it might be sensible to subject your plants to the opposite of 'hardening off' ('softening up'?) - introduce them to their new conditions by stages. The one crucial thing to remember is that these plants will need frequent watering while inside - check the surface of the compost daily with your fingers and water when dry to the touch.

Pots of bulbs that may have been intended for outside can generally be encouraged to flower early by bringing them indoors. In these bleak midwinter days, I love to have a house full of bowls of early blooms - miniature irises and daffodils on the dining-table; hyacinths perfuming a bathroom; little pots of grape hyacinths on my desk or by a window. I have even been known to dig up clumps of snowdrops in bud and repot them as bedside treats for winter guests. As the time for dividing and replanting snowdrops is immediately after flowering anyway, they ought not to suffer from the disturbance.

The other thing you can do with outdoor pots is to make sure they can be admired from the house when their moment of glory arrives. In our London garden I have a young fig tree planted in a pot - too big to bring inside now - which has 50 or so tiny Iris reticulata planted around its base. Wherever it stands in the garden for the rest of the year, I make sure I lug it over to the french windows when I see the first pale green nibs poking through the soil. Irises are so beautiful in all the slow stages of their unfolding, from tight indigo scrolls to three-point firewheels of breathtaking beauty.

Keeping a small board on castors somewhere in the garden makes moving pots easier. And if you had all your pots on wheels, you could scoot them around - and inside and out - all year to your heart's content.

Brooks Megalomaniac posts: 791 (1/3/01 9:05:27 pm) 63.36.195.19 Reply | Edit | Del

Re: Indoor/outdoor gardening -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not clear to me why I have so little window and deckdoor space to winter these plants. Don't suppose it's cuz the cats have claimed these areas as their territories.

So, I'm down to keeping over my beloved pelargoniums (that's geraniums!). But I'll also start a Tiny Tim tomato plant in the hope that Dad will have a few bites long before the regulars come due about July 4th or so.

-- Anonymous, March 14, 2001