Thursday, October 29, 2009

Geocities Disaster

As I thought it might, the closing down of Geocities has messed up the 90% of Inspiring Plants built before I went across to paying for my hosting. I guess I was just naive in thinking that Yahoo would do something intelligent. As the pages were mainly built with Yahoo's simple online Pagebuilder, there is no back up offline. The new material was built with Frontpage which I find a lot slower and more fiddly working with an image rich site, that being the main reason why very little has been added in the past few years. Maybe I will switch over to largely publishing via this blog. Time will tell.

In the meantime, a picture of my Cyclamen colchicum which is having a good year. Not exactly the most elegant or best coloured flower but it is very sweetly scented, filling the greenhouse with it's perfume. I remember reading about this for the first time in the 70s when the plant was virtually unknown in the west where it was stated it took the longest time to come into flower from seed and was self sterile. I flowered plants within about a year and they do set limited seed. So much for recieved wisdom.

Monday, March 30, 2009

First Pleiones of the year



First two pleiones of the year, Pleione "krakatoa" (top) and Pleione Shantung "Gwen".

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Yellow Muscari



I only grow one Muscari at the moment and that is macrocarpum. I have the "normal" form which has yet to flower and a number of years back I bought "Golden Fragrance" which seems to have greener leaves but has done very well for me.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Meanwhile, in the garden...



First, the "art shot" Helloborus foetidus, then just a few primulas that lurk in one of the darkest corners, following that a pink lungwort (Pulmonaria) and finally something new, Chinodoxa Pink Giant..at about 5 inches tall (and not very pink either) but rather lovely.







Sunday, March 15, 2009

"Chilean Blue Crocus" Tecophilaea




Top: Tecophilaea cyanocrocus var leichtlinii and the type plant, Tecophilaea cyanocrocus below.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Three Frits



Top: Frit. kotschyana, I find this one a little overblown? Something not very subtle about it.
Middle: Frit aurea, one of the few yellows with this round flower shape.
Bottom: Frit davisii, I gerw this from seed. I waited 13 years for the flowers which even for Frits is a very long time. In yet it's supposed to be easy and quick. Frits are always full of suprises.



Sunday, March 08, 2009

A few Primula allionii












In order from the top; P.allionii "Marion", P. allionii "Lacewing", P.allionii "Flute", P. allionii "Eureka" and P.allionii "Anne"