The Most Accommodating Plant

 A few years back, I was given a single Nemesia Wisley Vanilla. I jokingly call it my "Nemesis" (it helps me to remember its name) but it is anything but an enemy. It may be one of my best friends. This is because it is such an accommodating plant. Every year I have taken cuttings - simply snipping off a bit of stem below a pair of leaves - and all of them have rooted. The babies never demand special treatment. I just do the snipping in autumn, shove them in a plant pot filled with leftover compost and leave them in the greenhouse. This is what a couple of autumn 2020 cuttings look like now:

Yes they are flowering away in January, oblivious to the cold and dark! They don't care! Other new plants have been shoved into outside hanging baskets for a bit of greenery and they're not even sulking. 

I now have several plants, all in pots, dotted around the garden. I prune them in the spring but that is all they seem to want. Each year the sweet, faintly tobacco scented flowers are added to my pot pourri so they do get picked a lot. You could also add them to a bunch of cut garden flowers, as the stems are long enough. 

Every cutting lives and no plant ever seems to die. Talk about hardy. Perhaps I will try one in the actual garden rather than a pot next, just to see what happens....






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