There's a dentist in Birmingham . . .

Sorry wrong song. Maybe it should have been ‘There’s a grocer in the Isle of Wight’! I’ll explain later.

For the last few years we’ve taken my elderly aunt to the Isle of Wight for a weekend, staying in a lovely guest house high up in Ventnor. The house has a steeply sloping garden – not as steep as mine, but very much larger! – which is full of interesting shrubs most of which owner Mick has acquired from the nearby Ventnor Botanic Garden, just along the road. The VBG is on the site of the old TB hospital where my aunt was a nurse in the early 1950s, which is the reason for taking her there.

A couple of years ago I noticed a pleasantly variegated shrub which I couldn’t identify. I assumed that it had come from the same source and was surprised when I was told that he'd actually bought it at a grocer’s shop in Newport, the island’s capital! I accept that grocer’s shops might occasionally sell plants, but not something as unusual as Aristotelia chilensis ‘Variegata’! Very odd – I’d love to know where the grocer obtained them – it’s rather like finding a Ferrari for sale in the local petrol station! The species, unsurprisingly, hails from Chile and I was allowed to take cuttings, leading to these three plants today.

Still on the theme of Chile, my extra is of some young plants of what has always been known as Blechnum cycadifolium, a fern from the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Robinson Crusoe Island is one of the group. Unfortunately for gardeners, some hard-working taxonomist decided to break up the genus Blechnum into a number of new ones, so this fern must now be known as Lomariocycas cycadifolia!

Limerick of the Day:

In a sea lane just off Casablanca
Lay a fishing boat bobbing at anca.
The captain and crew
Planned to see Timbuktu
But were run down that night by a tanca.