Supermarket surprise

A mild windless day today, with a bit of drizzle in the afternoon. I’ve been out listing plants in my fern bed, tho’ dark and damp stopped me from getting on too far.  I must keep a plan on computer in case labels get lost or broken. One day, when I have gone or the house is sold, then the new owners will be delighted to have a list of all the plants in the garden, and their locations. (Ha! Probably not!)

A friend and I were recently discussing, jokingly of course, what fun it would be to start a nursery supplying only plants that we, or home gardeners in general, had never heard of! I’m not sure if there would be any profit to be made, but there would be a few members of a small section of the population who would be interested and keen to find out more. I am one such member!

It’s not often that I find a plant in a nursery or garden centre that is a complete and total surprise to me, and to find such a plant in a small town supermarket is a very rare happening. On Friday we were unable to shop at Lidl as car owners attending a local funeral had taken every single space! We went to Aldi instead and on the way in from the car park I noticed a batch of silvery plants on the outside trolley. As Christmas is coming up I assumed that they were heathers or similar that had been sprayed silver, but to my amazement I found that they were real! Not only that, but they were labelled, not with the usual ‘Foliage plant’ or ‘Green Plant’, but with the name Calocephalus brownii.  I’m sure that there will many of you who will say ‘I grow this all the time’, but it was new to me and before buying any I went home to look it up. Apparently more correctly named these days as Leucophyta brownii, they are small shrubs hailing from the rocky shores of the south of Australia and can tolerate a lot of heat and dry conditions, for which the west of Scotland is known! Not.

So I went back today and bought three, £2.99 each, and will try to keep them going. They are said to be hardy down to minus 5, given dry conditions, so they should survive the winter here in a cold frame. We will see!