It's repotting time!

Every year, when the weather turn reliably pleasant and the plants leap into growth, I get busy repotting the ghetto. There are basically two groups of plants: the tender ones that live in pots and have spent the winter in the house or in a cold greenhouse; and the ones that live out on the terrace. These plants have had a hard winter. The tender ones in the house have spent months gathering dust in a dark chilly back room; the ones in the cold greenhouse do a bit better, with occasional water, though it's not too warm there, either though, the critical point, temperatures stay above freezing.

The pots on the terrace are filled with hardy plants intended for the garden. A few are plants purchased in spring and waiting for planting out in fall, since local nurseries don't sell plants at planting time, but rather when they're looking their prettiest; but the great majority are plants I've propagated, mainly from cuttings, a few from suckers or seeds, and generally started in the fall, some the previous spring. Oh, and I forgot the monsters: the plants that are hardy but that won't grow, generally, in our conditions of climate and soil. These are mainly the aspidistras, plain and variegated. They grow and grow, and I give them away with full hands, but there are only so many people who want aspidistras, even variegated. Still, I divide and replant them every spring.

So, this year's crop. Piles of shrub germander, a beautiful, useful dry climate shrub that roots easily, except that it takes a year longer than most of its kin, so starting it is an investment. Yellow-foliaged phlomis that, unlike its two shrubby cousins, doesn't seed, so must be propagated from cuttings. The other kinds of phlomis I've been digging seedlings or suckers from the garden to plant on. A few puny plants of hybrid Caryopteris. A couple of the beautiful yellow-variegated culinary sage 'Icterina'. A population of winter shrub honeysuckle that is growing fine, but I'm not sure where to put it. Some odds and ends of climbing or semi-climbing honeysuckle. Several pots of Ruscus hypoglossum, an excellent evergreen groundcover for dry shade. This is stoloniferous, so that bits of it can be dug out and divided, but doing so is a devilish task, at least in the heavy clay mine grows in. I grubbed some bits out a year or two ago and potted them up, and now intend to keep a piece permanently in a pot, to divide up when I need more plants. All my plants are in any case clones of the original crowded pot I found years ago in the back lot of a local nursery.

I'm still looking into the plants further in, the ones living under the pergola. The pergola itself needs work. It's bowing under the weight of roses and faults of its original construction, and while DH, who is a small man, can comfortably walk under it, I can't. Another chore. It's highly ornamental with its flowering mass of roses, in particular 'Mrs. B.R. Cant', now in full bloom, and, further on, 'Mme. Alfred Carrière', with its long arching canes strung with pink-tinted white fragrant large blooms. The pergola was a grand idea, giving the roses more room to grow, giving us a lovely scenic place, making use of that unfriendly expanse of baking paved terrace, and offering protection to the pot ghetto, which allowed us to move it from under the wisteria pergola in front of the house and making the latter available as living space, always assuming I can keep the guys from storing construction materials there. I want outdoor furniture! After DH built the pergola and I trained the roses onto it, I got him to take up part of the terrace along the inside of the pergola, where we built beds and planted two columnar oaks (two kinds, and one not so narrowly columnar as it turns out) and a narrow bed of mostly dry climate little plants of the kind that tend to get run over in the garden: thyme, golden oregano, pinks. It's all very green and flourishing now, with just enough room left for a clothesline, which does need sun and heat.

So far I've repotted about a hundred plants, justifying my enormous collection of empty pots. I've cleaned up areas of terrace and have recycled the old repotting material into the garden, valuable because we never have enough sand and organic matter, regardless of how exhausted it may be. Still plenty of work ahead: the succulents in the cold greenhouse, including the thorny spiny dangerous cacti; the aspidistras and nameless numerous things in pots: a voyage of discovery and a chance to clean house.

Once the wisteria has finished flowering, I'll resume training it, with the hopes of having a plant that will cover its pergola this year and give us welcome shade. We had foundation work done last year that required the removal of much of the pergola and its wisteria, so now it has to be guided onto the new pergola. After that (my plan is) to move a line of nicely ornamental plants, including large pots of aspidistra, onto the edge of the brick terrace under the pergola, still leaving plenty of room for that much-desired patio furniture. Oh, yes, and we need a bench by the front door.