Moving home

This camelia, a gift from a friend, had been living on the patio for some years, where it did reasonably well and usually flowered. It also blew over from time to time, often enough that I thought of tethering it to the garage wall, but never got around to it. As a result, the containing pot eventually broke and has been tied up with twine for the last few months. The plan was removal after flowering rather than repotting.

However, it is now the end of March, the flower buds are only just starting to open and so we decided that we had better move it now. Camelias do not move well and we thought that it should be moved now while it was damp and mild, rather than later on when it would be dry and hot - and our clay soil would be very hard.

Yesterday was removal day, with the result illustrated. You would not know from this picture but it looks well between the yellow buddleia left (grown from a cutting abstracted from a holiday cottage near the headwaters of the River Severn) and the rather larger nut tree right (the one that the grey squirrels strip every year before there are any nuts in the shells. Rather dim & annoying animals). We shall see how it gets on; the last camelia we moved took several years to recover its nursery vigour.

A five implement job: mattock, small spade, garden trowel, the 'Wolf' grubber and an oak batten for tamping down the earth around the root ball. Plus wheelbarrow and gloves. Plus half a sack of camelia flavoured compost, 100g of camelia pellets and two two gallon cans of water to get it started. Several buckets of displaced yellow clay now scattered along the base of the fence.

PS: as an afterthought, the newly moved camelia was tethered with three guy ropes, Baden Powell style, using some more of the twine mentioned above, The idea being to stop rock during re-establishment.

Reference 1: http://www.worldofwolf.co.uk/multichange/allotment.