Plant News

I spent all of yesterday morning in the garden, pulling the spent Michaelmas daisies and trying to cut back some of the overgrowth -- the dying inulas, lots of blackberry vines and ivy, one of the sunflowers. There's more to do, but I think it will wait until next week. I already have more than my allotted two bags of garden waste for this week's pickup.

While clearing underbrush I found this little hawkweed, or fox-and-cubs, in bloom. It seems late in the season so I was happy to come across it.

I also revealed this plant, which had been overshadowed by bigger shrubs. It's a lamium that I collected as a cutting while walking Olga several years ago. I put it in the ground and it grew for a while, and then it seemed to vanish. I thought it had died, but no -- it's back!

Indoors, three of our Thanksgiving cacti are blooming away. Another one, the smallest, which I grew from cuttings sent last year by blog reader Frances, is still working up some flowers but it has buds. Stay tuned!

Now, on to the plant rescue portion of the day. This is a mystery plant given to us many years ago -- when we first moved into this flat, actually -- by our friend Sally. We've never known what it is and we put it in the rock garden, where it seemed to do OK for a while. It's even hardy enough to live through our winters. But then it got overshadowed by the hydrangeas and lost among the other greenery, and I wasn't even sure it was still with us. Yesterday I located it and saw that it had been broken apart by some critter -- possibly a squirrel, possibly a fox, possibly Olga.

Anyway, I had to move it to a better place so I put it in a pot (along with a cyclamen growing so closely that I couldn't separate them). It's now in the dining room. I think I'll just keep it in a pot, actually. We'll see how it goes. I'm trying to root one of the broken bits too, in a separate pot.

Oh, and I discovered (after some research) what it is. It's Crassula sarcocaulis, a hardier relative of the jade plant.

Finally, here's a close-up of the abandoned prayer plant I adopted while walking Olga last weekend. My plant finder calls it a "rattlesnake plant," but it is indeed related to prayer plants. You can see the leaves are a bit brown at the edges -- that's probably either from too much sun or getting too dry. Hopefully I can rehabilitate it.

Last night Dave and I went out for my birthday. He bought me a beautiful shirt at Selfridges, and we tried to go to a bar near St. James's Palace that allegedly produces the best martinis in London -- but they were packed full so we went around the corner to another place. It was an Indian restaurant, but darned if they didn't also make a perfectly fine martini.

Then we went across the street where three drunk women asked us if we were Sid, or if we knew Sid. Images of Dan Rather and "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" came to mind, but they proved harmless. I assured them we did not know Sid. As Dave and I walked away, I heard one of them say to the others, "I think they're together."

We went to a French restaurant that was pretty good but had a weirdly cold-looking dining room. As I told Dave, it felt like a French restaurant in the Ukraine. But we enjoyed the food and we even took a taxi home, which is quite a luxury for us!