Frost Tender Plants
Frost Tender Plants
At Keppel Croft we keep many frost tender plants in their pots and place them in the gardens for the gardening season. Over winter we store these pots in various warm places. Winter clivias, orchids and palms come into the house. The formium tenax and the agapanthus plants join the olive trees in the pit greenhouse.. The bamboo, oleanders and the succulents are stored in the workshop greenhouse. Cannas and dahlias end up being stored in the basement.
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In the spring of 2019, we subdivided and repotted our Formium tenax (New Zealand flax). We dropped two plastic pots of flax plants into these white urns in the late spring.
At the end of the season we take the flax pots to the pit greenhouse for the winter. Then we place pots of sand in the urns and make arrangements of dogwood and evergreen boughs for the winter.
In the early spring, we put plastic pots of Formium tenax into these large ceramic pots. The ceramic pots mark the place where the dry stream meets the lawn, a pretty wet place in the spring of 2019.
Before winter we remove the potted formiums and store them on the floor of the pit greenhouse and put the ceramic containers in the potting shed.
Agapanthus grew in my mother’s New Zealand garden. We have some hardy varieties growing and blooming very well in the garden but these lovely blue agapanthus are not winter hardy so they all grow in pots.
In late summer when we need some colour accents in this border Bill places the pots discretely and the garden look is achieved. These plants winter in the pit greenhouse.
We enjoy the winter blooms of the clivias but need a place for numerous pots of them outside during the warm months of the year. We nestle the pots of clivia into a bed of English ivy. The dappled shade of the crabapple tree suits these plants well. An overflow of potted palms keep them company.
Bill’s collection of cymbidium orchids spends the summer outside. One summer we lined them up under the drip line of the porch roof. The filtered light through nearby trees seems adequate but we found the shade was too dense. These orchids bloom through the winter and early spring in the house.
Geraniums are reliable and colourful and take the summer heat well. In the spring of 2018 we renovated this garden area. An overflow of geraniums were potted up and gave a splash of colour to the edge of the garden. In winter we store the geraniums in windows of several barely heated areas of our home. Some spend the winter in the basement.
