Sometimes plants are sold to you when they really should still be in nappies, as it were. They are both really worth growing but they do need time. They also seem to be tougher than I thought, and have kept their foliage thus far, which is a great winter plus. Last year, they both flowered pretty well, and put on some cms in height, so I moved them both, in pots, under the bananas for the summer, where they really rather enjoyed themselves with regular watering and good shade.
This is the first year that these beautiful glossy black berries have been produced in quantity. Both have a wispy, loose bamboo-lite feel to the foliage, and the flowers are dramatic in form and a off-yellow-green colour hanging down like exotic earrings.
Both varieties have a subtle sombre elegance about them, and I am really hoping that they burst forth to their estimated mature height of 1.
This is a photograph of a sumptuous and luminously good hybrid tea rose which I bitterly regretted leaving behind when we moved four years ago. The crimson colouring is almost impossible to capture in sunlight, and this photo from November in actually shows the alomost electric colour in the winter light.
It is a tough old bird, coping heroically with terrible conditions in Tostat, and flowering in spurts for months. I got it from the reknowned and lovely Becky Hook, now hopefully enjoying her retirement somewhere nice, and I have been looking for it online ever since we moved four years ago.
