PLOT LINES

TIM FOSTER HAS SOME USEFUL TIPS ON HOW TO COPE WITH THE AMOUNT OF PLASTIC IN OUR GARDENS

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PLASTIC is such useful stuff. It is not surprising we have so much of it.

If you imagine carrying around plants in terracotta pots.... At my peak of athleticism - it didn't last long - I could manage four 3-litre shrubs in plastic pots in each hand. I doubt if could have carried half of that number if they were in clay pots.

If you think about it, the plastic plant pot gave birth to the garden centre. Before that you had retail nurseries which sold most of their plants in the dormant season when they were dug up from fields and sold with bare roots. Fussy specimens (that's the plants, not the customers) would be in clay pots and bedding plants would be grown in wooden seed trays. I still remember the smell of the disinfectant used to sterilise wooden trays which doesn't accurately reflect my age (the nursery owner I worked for was years behind).

Maybe the growing and selling of bare root plants is something we should do more of. Virtually all woodland and hedgerow plants I've used to this day have been bare root. Perhaps we should return to bare root brassicas, buying bundles of them wrapped in wet newspaper.