No way to treat a hedychium

Much of the weather recently has varied from drizzly to downright wet, discouraging me from getting on with bigger jobs like cutting the buddleja back.  There’s no real excuse not to do work in the greenhouse, however.

The greenhouse needs a good clear-out; much of the space is occupied by used plastic flowerpots and old compost sacks, but under the staging in the far corner is where the hedychiums have been sitting.  Hedychiums are ornamental gingers, known also as the ginger lily, and they have big exotic leaves and spikes of highly scented flowers.  They like heat and moisture and, like dahlias, in the UK they will overwinter in the ground in sheltered locations if well mulched, but in colder spots are better brought under cover and kept dryish and frost-free.  Last spring I split them and potted up seven pieces in new compost, but my good intentions with them didn’t last; they each produced one or more leaf-spikes but my watering regime was lacklustre to put it mildly, even during the summer heatwave, and they had to endure searing temperatures in the greenhouse; in autumn one of the flower-spikes started to bloom, rather half-heartedly, but finally petered out.  The greenhouse was neither heated nor insulated over the winter, and the temperature dropped to -3C at one point, which is definitely on the low side.  It’s no way to treat a hedychium.

Hedychium about to flower last autumn - or not ....

Last week I bit the bullet and emptied them out of their pots to see what the damage was.  Less than might have been expected, actually.  Some of the tubers had put their roots down through the bottom of the pots and into the builders’ gravel that the pots had been standing on, and that seemed to have kept them going.  A couple of the potfuls looked beyond saving, but some of the others either seemed to have tubers with some vestiges of life in them, or roots that were still viable, and these were potted up again with fresh compost.  We’ll see.

The dahlias were also examined.  These were outdoors in various pots when the weather turned cold early last winter, rather suddenly, and I brought anything that could be put under cover into the greenhouse as quickly as possible.  One pot had been hastily housed outdoors under a table and predictably the tubers were now rotted away; some of the smaller tubers in the greenhouse were either dried out or worm-eaten, but I managed to salvage a reasonable range of varieties and potted them up.  Again, fingers crossed; ‘Sam Hopkins’ already has new shoots coming.

Alongside the dahlias and hedychiums I found a pot of freesia bulbs that did nothing at all last year and had been subjected to the same lack of summer watering and freezing winter temperatures as the tubers.  I picked the pot up and was about to empty the contents out to recycle the compost when I noticed a few shoots poking through.  I left well alone, watered it and put it with the other pots to be fed and watered in the coming weeks.  You never know …