On 1/5/05 11:40, in article , "Lee
and Kath" wrote:

On 28 Apr 2005 10:59:43 GMT, (Nick Maclaren) wrote:


In article , Magwitch writes:
|
| I want to move a 4-year-old one planted in a panic to get *anything* in a
| bed trashed by builders because I'm devoting the bed to herbs (physic and
| edible). Should I wait until it's flowered or a bit longer and move it in
| winter? It's about 1.3 m all round.

It will probably die anyway. They are as hard to transplant as
brooms. Start with a new one.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

If some plants are notoriously bad to transplant and die at the first sniff of
being moved, how come
they are OK to buy as pot plants?

How do we ever manage to buy these ?

When you buy them as potted up plants you're taking their planting
environment with them. It's a sort of self-contained unit which suffers
minimal root disturbance because it's contained in a small area. When you
uproot something well-established in the garden and move it, the roots are
probably bigger and have spread further and therefore the disturbance is
greater. If you look at the roots in a potted up plant, they're a neat,
tidy bundle, not a sprawling mass over and down several feet.
This is why, when people want to move large shrubs or tricky shrubs, they're
advised to take a (comparatively) huge amount of soil around the root with
it. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. People do buy mature
trees with enormous root balls, for thousands of pounds, and transplant them
- but the risk is theirs!
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove the weeds to email me)