Hurray! My packet of seeds from the RHS Seeds for Members scheme arrived today. I put in the order as soon as the list went up (I think that was the start of November) but haven’t given it a lot of thought since then. The arrival of the envelope puzzled me at first until I opened it and saw the labelled seed packets inside.

There are all sorts of exotic sounding things, like Thalictrum rochebruneanum (Lavender Mist Meadow Rue) and Glycyrrhiza yunnanensis (Yunnan Liquorice). Unfortunately, there isn’t any kind of guide to when or how to plant the seeds or how to care for the plants. A few are more familiar: we had Helleborus argutifolius (Holly-leaved Hellebore) and Stipa gigantea (Golden Oats) in our garden in Oxford. Indeed, I think we grew the Stipa from a previous batch of RHS seeds, although I seem to recall they came with (long since lost) instructions.

Still, gleaning what knowledge we can and experimenting is all part of the fun. If they all come up, we will struggle to find room to plant them all and, even if we only have an incredibly low success rate of two or three plants, we’ll still have more than broken even on what it would have cost to buy these (relatively uncommon, seeds not widely sold) plants pre-grown from a garden centre.