The message
from "Mike Lyle" contains these words:

jane wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 07:33:35 +0100, Malcolm
wrote:

~
~In article , cupovt
[...]
~I took a pic today and put it on this home page (please scroll a
~fraction if you can't see the pic straight away)
~http://flowersbasket.bravehost.com
~
~
~A magnificent clump of Nerines. I'm jealous! Ours have been
flowering
~well this year but we've some years to do before they look like
that.

Blimey. I've got two flower spikes this year in my tiny little
potful... those are just incredible!

Yes, wow! They seem to be a bit fussy about soil and situation: I've
noticed that they grow like weeds in Faversham, Kent. I don't know
what the soil is, but in some of the front gardens there, they are
the only thing growing, and pushing one another out of the ground. A
lovely plant.

I reckon nerines thrive best on total neglect and starvation. The
biggest and best clumps seem to grow in gardens almost devoid of
anything else. The first time I ever saw nerines, was in a
rubbish-strewn tiny derelict patch outside a grim Glasgow south-side
tenement. The soil was so starved, even weeds didn't grow. Every autumn
for many years, I used to make a detour that way just to enjoy the
extravagant bunch of nerines. There are very old gardens here on Arran,
absolutely choked with them atm. In Corrie village, you can see where
neighbours must have shared them out, decades ago, and they're growing
extravagantly among bare pebbles from one terraced cottage to the next.
There's another house elsewhere, perhaps empty, whose garden is just a
year-round untended weedfest. Except in autumn, when a huge row of
nerines bursts forth out of the wilderness.

Some of you may remember that last year, at the end of an Arran
village plant sale, I took home a box nobody wanted, full of bare
bulbs. Scrawled on it, was "Irene's...yellow". I could see they were
nerines and hoped I'd discovered a yellow sort :-) They're not, they're
pink ones, in glorious flower atm..

I bought some dark red ones in Madeira, which never came to anything,
not even leaves, don't know why because the bulbs still look big firm
and healthy. They're the only stuff I brought from Madeira that failed.

Janet.