New Pots, and I'm Locked Out!

Flowers on our purple heart (Tradescantia)

Yesterday was the day to take care of some long-standing issues among our plants. I got myself motivated early in the morning, while it was still relatively cool, and got to work.

First I dug up and discarded our dead tamarisk tree and our ailing broom. This is much easier said than done because the ground is as hard as iron right now, having had no rain to speak of for almost two months. (The BBC says parts of Southeast England have had their driest April on record, with just over a third of the rainfall we'd get in an average year, and May hasn't been any better. Apparently we're not technically in a drought because we had a lot of rain over the winter, but that's not helping the garden plants now!)

Then I grabbed my garden-shop gift card and headed down to Maida Vale on the bus. I went back to Clifton Nurseries and picked up some more supplies: A gigantic pot for our olive tree, two nice big pots for a couple of other plants that needed new homes, and some bags of soil. I also bought a new Brugmansia purely on a whim.

I brought everything home in an Uber and got to work on some heavy-duty repotting. The result is...

...a new home for this previously rootbound prayer plant...

...and for this ficus, which used to be a bunch of dead twigs...

...and for the new Brugmansia, now in the pot that used to hold the prayer plant.

I still have to deal with the olive, and I'm not sure how to go about that. Our passionflower vine, which grew of its own accord from a seed, is living in the same pot and growing up a wall, so it's going to be hard to maneuver the olive tree into a new pot while not damaging the vine. I just couldn't deal with it yesterday because I was already tired and sore after all that other work.

In the middle of all this, who should reappear but Mrs. Russia! You'll recall that she and her husband rented out their apartment above us, and I haven't seen her since last summer. She stopped in to trim the shrubs out on their terrace. We chatted a bit and she asked about Mrs. Kravitz's air conditioner and whether it was noisy. I said I hadn't even noticed it -- I didn't realize the Kravitzes (next door) even have an air conditioner -- but Mrs. Russia is annoyed that it's been installed within earshot of her own terrace. "Maybe we should buy one and point it at them!" she said.

Dueling air conditioners!

Then I got a bit paranoid about her wielding pruning shears, so I told her we'd planted some new bushes in the front garden so she wouldn't mistakenly cut them down. She got a bit snippy (no pun intended) about why we'd planted bushes without her approval, and I said we got our landlord's approval, and it was up to the landlord to keep her informed. And that was pretty much the end of our exchange.

But again, I got worried. We have a lot of beautiful campanula growing around our front steps, along with some pink valerian and some other wildflowers. The Russians have long chafed at my tendency to allow those plants to grow -- they like the steps pressure-washed and tidy as a hospital.

So I went out and made a video of the steps, including the bees loving the campanula. I figured if Mrs. Russia tore it out I'd at least have a record of it. I later added some music because there was a lot of street noise, including conversations from passing pedestrians, distant sirens and my own front door slamming and me exclaiming "Sh*t!" because I didn't have my house keys on me!

Yes, I was indeed locked out. I called Dave and he made plans to send a co-worker to our flat with his keys, but I knocked on the Kravitzes' door and as luck would have it someone was home and I was able to get into their back garden and, using a ladder, boost myself over the garden fence. Our own back door was open so that got me back inside our house. Criminy!

Anyway, Mrs. Russia did not trim anything in the front or weed the steps, so those worries were unfounded, at least in the immediate moment. But I'm sure she went back to wherever she's living now grousing that we're allowing the place to go to pot, not to mention fuming over Mrs. Kravitz's air conditioner. I try to be friendly with her but I hope she doesn't move back here.