Horticultural Exotica

Saturday was a clearly a target day for community shopping in our charming neighbourhood of Cambridge. We live in the kind of area which attracts veg boxes, copies of the guardian, John Lewis delivery vans and children's-second-language-of-your-choice au pairs like bees to the organic honey pot. Local plant sales for charity are right up the collective alley, if indeed there were any alleys left that hadn't fallen victim to house extensions and garden landscaping. Jumble sales too, even if this one was organised by the local branch of the Labour Party (not so popular in the Lib Dem heartlands except among crusty elderly socialists, still wearing Soviet cap badges from the first time around). What more could a self-proclaimed self-respecting organic lifestyle enthusiast require?

Improbably enough, I ended up with a kiwi plant. I walked into the plant sale to discover most of the plants on offer actually required a garden rather than a series of pots. Except for this kiwi plant, which improbably enough was marketed as a patio plant. It looked a bit sad in its cardboard box, and plastic wrapper, and I'm a sucker for the proverbial puppy at the dogs home, especially if it has leaves. Still, I thought, I have enough plants, and not many pots left. Whither the courgettes, if I fall for the charms of a furry fruit like this, however plaintive looking? So I start to drift unobtrusively towards the door, when I wasaccosted by one of the formidable and hearty ladies of the Newnham Gardening Club. Think the kind of women who have been cruelly deprived by social developments of the the last eighty years of a large house complete with platoons of housemaids to manage.

'Not see anything you like?'
'...I'm not sure I really have the space...'
'Rubbish, you've obviously come here, you have to get something'
'....'
'It's for charity, you know'
'...'
'What have you got to lose? £1.50? tchah'.

Blackmailed by the eldery and well-spoken, I go home to look up kiwis in my fruit book to discover not only that most varieties required a male and female plant (fingers crossed for this one being self-pollinating), but that they can grow up to 30 feet, apparently being especially suitable for covering unsightly walls, pagodas etc. Not exactly my idea of a pot plant, but it's nevertheless sitting comfortably in one of my best planters, surrounded by a complicated frame of canes and wire. And it looks happy now.

To complete a day of horticultural silliness, I also bought a coffee and cinnamon plant at the garden centre. Apparently if I look after the coffee plant for three years, it may actually produce beans. I have named it Clovis, after the first Christian king of the Merovingian Franks, because I actually am that much of a geek.