Our City & Guilds Horticulture course trainees with Grow for Life were grateful for the good weather this Tuesday. We started our session learning about perennials in the Urban Garden nursery.
It's important when we are learning about new plants to really engage all our senses, and drawing can help our focus. We notice the differences in shape, form and pattern, as well as colour. Not everything is just green.
Holding the plants can helps appreciate texture. We even had a small magnifying glass to see right up close. We also noticed that many of these plants have a different leaf shapes when the leaves are young, compared to the adult leaves. Yarrow cultivars (Achillea), Bears breeches (Acanthus mollis), Globe thistle (Echinops retro), Verbena bonariensis, and Pincushion flower (Scabiosa caucasica), the only one actually in flower today.
Following this, we celebrated a late birthday together, before getting on with some potting on exercises. It's important to provide more space for roots and are nutrients from the new potting mix, so the plants continue to develop. We potted on Spider plants (Chlorophytum cosomum), that our fellow Thursday group had originally propagated, and Creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia). Some of these plug were difficult to get out whole from the tray, but we persevered and continued to handle the young plants with care.
A tree walk in the park finished off our activities, adding more names and stories of these trees to our list we are learning. So good to be outdoors together.