The lack of activity in its blank-faced contemporaries led me to conduct investigations. Using a pen as my probe, I firked around the compost until I met with the little truffley nuggets which are the swollen corms of the anemones. I uprooted one to investigate, and found that despite it maintaining its shape, it had turned into a splodge, rather than a nugget, and oozed whitely when poked. Oh dear. That's not going to grow. The lesson to learn from this is that I MUST remember to make a really sharply drained potting mix next time I plant them and perhaps water more sparingly to boot.
But for every tragedy there is a triumph. Sowed seeds of achillea 'Ptarmica' a few days ago and read with a heavy heart that 'germination may take between one and three months'. Spotted a fleck of green on the surface of the seed tray when peering through the condensation of the propagator lid, pulled it out of the fuggy warmth, and found a whole downy crop of sprouters populating the surface of the compost. Yippee! Result! So for my 12 deceased anemones, I have about 200 achilleas....
Gardening in my view is muck, magic and learning lessons. Like British football teams in Europe, a lot of what we sow doesn't make it to the finals. But if something fails, just sow something else. There are lots of seeds in a packet and the law of averages tells me that if I keep going, I'm bound to get something to grow. It seems to have worked so far!
Last year's pink achillea - this year's will be white.
