How did this year go? I have got fine healthy leaves, and I am going to
protect them as I did last year, they are proving as stated, that they take
3 years to flower! I have found seedlings underneath one in the ground,
and I am going to have to protect them from frost this year I think, they
are about 4inches tall, what do you suggest?

On 11/10/2010 07:58, sheila wrote:
How did this year go? I have got fine healthy leaves, and I am going to
protect them as I did last year, they are proving as stated, that they take
3 years to flower! I have found seedlings underneath one in the ground,
and I am going to have to protect them from frost this year I think, they
are about 4inches tall, what do you suggest?




Hello Sheila,

Sadly, I have only one plant left :~(. I was doing really well, having
31 good plants, until we had a searingly hot period of drought in the
summer. RG, meaning well I'm sure, went out and set up the sprinkler.
Although I warned him not to let it 'rain' on anything close to the
house (where I can manually water special plants more carefully), he set
the sprinkler to have a wider rain pattern.

When I was finally able to go outside, I found that the Agapanthus
plants were wet through, still in full sun, and looking very sick.
Clearly, they had held water in the crown which had boiled in the
intense heat. Having had this happen to some Allium plants a couple of
summers before, I left the plants to drain and dry out so that I could
check the roots (many of the Alliums had survived). When I subsequently
looked at the roots, they were all dead, except for my one remaining
plant which had been on the periphery of the sprinkler pattern.

This one plant is doing very well and even has a mini-offset at the
base. It has leaves 3-4" long. I may very well bring this plant
indoors for the winter in my cool garden room. Hopefully, I can keep it
going until it flowers, after which I can collect seed. Fingers crossed.

Can you protect your outdoor seedlings by coralling the base of the
entire plant (parent plant included) with scrunched-up chicken wire,
then packing around that with fleece or bark? I assume the parent plant
is fairly hardy since it is in the ground, but some extra protection
wouldn't hurt. I've got all my flowering size Agapanthus in pots and
generally bring them in to the garden room in winter, together with my
dahlias, bulbines, Isoplexis et al. It's often a bit crowded :~).

--
Spider
from high ground in SE London
gardening on clay

Hi sheila, one point of interest, living in Cornwall as I do, I am surrounded by agapanthus as they do very well down here!! There is one problem and its that even seed taken off white plants often have a high proportion of blue ones amongst them (ref Mendels initial work on hybridisation) So, Im just interested where you got the seed as, they may not even be white ?? I grow and sell hundreds of blue ones but to ensure that the white ones are indeed white, i now rely on vegetative propagation only!! If you bought F1 hybrid seed then they should be ok but remember, plants grown from the seed of these will only initially throw 1/3 that are white. Just a point of interest ??
Best Wishes Lannerman