What I grow , but others can’t get your hands on ….

Hi everyone

thought it would be interesting to start a thread of plants you grow but no one else sells them .. and I have looked can’t find anyone selling in the UK

I grow lots of Hemerocallis Aka daylily, to start this off this is:

One hot mama

 

When B was alive we used to collect Fuchsias, there were lots of nurseries then and we had many unusual varieties. Now however, with many of the specialist Fuchsia nurseries closed you can't get those varieties ... and since I've lost lots of them I can't replace them now.

 

The only thing that springs to mind is a lovely Cistus that i got from a Mediterranean nursery near Beziers but which they no longer list. Despite desperately trying to strike cuttings of it, the mother plant is on it's way out and not one cutting has rooted. They're usually soooo easy!

 

I have two dwarf conifers, Abies Koreana "Kristallkugel" and Abies Koreana "Wellenseind". They were bought from a conifer nursery that no longer trades, in memory of my sister, because in the last conversation I had with her she wondered if I would like a dwarf conifer for my birthday.

 

I lost a 30 yr old plant of Fabiana imbricata a couple of years ago, I managed to root one cutting but it died on me a few months before the old plant died a year later.

 

Exacum affine is another one apparently unavailable in UK (although it was once). This year I was able to get some seeds and they came from China but I haven't sowed them yet. We'll see how they do.

 

I have a number of plants that are not available through nurseries, but are available from collectors who swap or sell (generally fairly cheap) plants, seeds, cutting material quite happily.

 

Oh @Spruce I wish you hadn't started this excellent thread! Now I'm going to have a wish list of even more plants that I can't get!
About 20 years ago there were so many more small nurseries selling their own special things - I remember one on Isle of Man that sold Australian plants, Tympany nursery in Ireland, Michael Wickenden at Cally Gardens...

 

I have some sport of what I think is Geranium Plenum. It has a single mauve flower but it flowers very early for where I live in Scotland, usually about April and then again with no cutting back in about September. It has bright orange roots and absolutely hates being moved….annoying! I bought it from a private seller in Sterling and never seen or heard of it anywhere else. It self seeded very well, almost too well in a previous garden . I brought seed of it to my current garden where it is not nearly so prolific. Every year I cross my fingers that the few plants I have will not conk out as will not be able to replace it. In a previous garden I planted a collection of Sorbus including one called Beauty of Banff. It was cracking with really big bright pink berries, way nicer than other pink fruiting Sorbus. The nursery up in Banff went out of business and I have never been able to source it again….wish I could have dug it up and brought it to my current home as the owners of the my previous house dug up all the Sorbus I had planted ( about 15) and binned the lot.

 

Hi

I sometimes sell spare fans on eBay of my daylilys so I was looking for (One hot mama) to see what it’s selling for in the UK .. to be honest I have given away more than sold . And when I coudnt find a seller in the UK I thought that will make a good thread.

I did have a kniphophi called Springtime and I lost it from the beast from the east that awful weather we had , and I found 1 supplier in the Uk , only to find out the Beast from the East had killed there stock plants ,, never seen available again

Spruce

 

Scented Geraniums. I had lots in the UK bought from a nursery in Oxfordshire. Never seen them here but got a cutting from Italy of Rose Scented and have managed to get it rooted.

 

I've had that happen to me as well.

 

Hence the importance of sharing your plants with like-minded friends, relatives and gardeners! One of the well-known ones (can't remember which) said donkey's years ago that the best way to keep a plant was to give it away I'd add, preferably over as wide a geographical area as possible!

 

This is a sort of similar to an old lady telling me to steal some of her Tropaeolum Speciosm. I had tried buying it 3 or 4 times and it never survived but the bit I managed to find while she made us a cup of tea!(difficult to locate as it roots in one place and can come up metres away) took no bother at all and has been in my garden for at least the last 10 years. Old wives tale but proved to be true in my experience!

 

Do you think it's partly to do with the plant being fresh, minimally disturbed and having a bit more TLC because of it's associations with friends, hailbopp? Certainly with T. speciosum very few folks have success with a dried-out tuber that's been kicking round a garden centre for weeks or months. Same principle with Snowdrops, Anemones and Cyclamen...