![]() ![]() If anything, you now have to pay more for a really decrepit set, so scour your shed, and those of all your friends and relatives, to see if you can find one for free. Or just find an old wooden stepladder!Īnnoyingly, people used to just throw these away, but now they have cottoned on that there are many ways to use old wooden steps in the garden: not for climbing up, but for growing containers of veg in layers, so now you find that you have to buy them, even if they are paintstained and/or virtually falling apart. Wire shelving units are often sold for conservatory plants, and these are usually just the right scale for Auricula. To display them, just build or buy any sort of tiered shelving, preferably one whose shelves are just big enough to take the small size of terracotta pot: if your shelves are too big, too deep, or too far apart, then the plants look small and insignificant. It's remarkably simple, isn't it? Considering how beautiful the flowers are, I think these are some of the easiest plants to grow. In no time at all, you will have a selection of large flowering plants, and another selection of spares, to swap! Then leave it to grow, potting it on as it gets bigger. If there are no roots, that doesn't matter, just pot them up the same way: fill a small pot with damp compost, and push the pup in to about half of it's length. If there are roots, then pot up the pup just as you would a normal plant - ie in a small pot to start with, gradually potting on to bigger pots as they grow. If you can enlarge this photo, you can just see a couple of aerial roots already forming on these pups, from the base of the pair of pups on the right. To propagate, don't cut them off: instead you gently pull off the "pups": if you are lucky, the stalk of the pup - the brownish part - will come away from the parent stem to reveal small roots already formed, they seem to slide out of the parents' stalk. Here's one of mine, showing three good healthy pups growing on the stem. So, how do you start collecting them? Well, you buy one or two, making sure you buy hardy ones, and preferably ones without the "mealy" or farinose leaves.Īfter a while, or straight away if you buy any from me (*cheeky grin*), you will notice that the original plant is now producing baby plants, or "pups" as they are called. The flowers are held on single stalks, with a group of open, flat, plate-like flowers on the top. This coating is also the reason that Auricula are often known as "Dusty Miller". This is the bit which needs protection from the rain: rain ruins the mealy coating. ![]() "Leathery, often farinose foliage" means that the leaves are thick and fleshy, and "farinose" means that in some species, the leaves are covered with a dusty coating, which is often called meal or mealy. Let's break that down: evergreen perennials mean that they have green leaves all year round, unless it's a really hard winter: and they come back year after year, so they are very good value. Wow, way to go, RHS, make a beautiful flowering plant sound dull as ditchwater. The official word runs thus: *puts on plummy BBC accent* "Horticultural Group Auricula section primulas are evergreen perennials with leathery, often farinose foliage and simple umbels of salver-shaped flowers which are usually pink, purple or yellow". So, what's an Auricula, then? It's a type of primrose. All this lot started from just one of each colour. Here are some of my current spares, in the three colours of gold, pale lilac and deep purple. Of encouragement (errr, I sell the plants, the words of encouragement They are easy to propagate, which means that I can sell off the spares, along with words I have a lot of Auricula myself, in just three colours: none of them are the super-fancy ones, in fact only the yellow/gold ones have any degree of "meal" on the leaves, and even they don't have much: which means that these guys live in my cold, east-facing front yard outdoors, all year round, with no problems at all. They're actually very, very easy to grow, if you start with straightforward, fully hardy ones. How they must be protected from the sun, the rain, the wind, etc etc.Īll of this - the display stands, the hand-made pots, the "ooh, fussy about rain" - can give the impression that they are not something which the average garden owner can do. And here's another, this time a really pretty one, with a decorative scalloped roof, and bars to prevent accidental fall-out.Īs you can see, part of the display style is to have only one plant per pot, and apparently, it is considered de rigueur (pretentious phrase meaning "the correct/stylish thing to do) to use only hand-made terracotta pots, not the modern machine-made ones.Īlso, if you do any research on them, you'll find a lot of scary detailĪbout how they have to be kept under cover to avoid spoiling the "meal", ![]()
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