In article ,
Sacha wrote:
On 15/12/05 12:03, in article , "Nick
Maclaren" wrote:

In article ,
Sacha wrote:
My son and daughter in law are visiting us and have brought with them from
Jersey a couple of Holboellia fruits. Ray had learned from their gardener
that he was just chucking them away! These large pink 'sausages' have
given us some lovely black seeds that Ray has rinsed of their pulp and will
be planting this morning. Fingers crossed!
These plants have never fruited with us, not even the one growing in one of
the glasshouses, so we're quite excited to see these - what an extraordinary
difference that slightly milder climate makes to gardening!

I would be happy to get flowers :-( The buds form, all right, but
the spring frosts do for them.

That's really bad luck because the scent is glorious. Would horticultural
fleece help at all or do your frosts just go on too late? We had a
Christmas card from a friend of Ray's who used be the gardener at Glamis
Castle and he said that they had frost right up until June last year! I
think I would find that very depressing!

Effectively, yes. The problem is that the warmth starts well before
the last significant frost, so the buds develop and then get killed.

The last frost I have ever seen here was on June 20th (and the earliest
on September 6th), but I haven't seen one after March for some years.
That may well not be true in 2006, of course.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.