EREMURUS or foxtail lilies are, according to the Royal Horticultural Society, “tall, stately perennials with fleshy, starfish like roots that will add height and interest to herbaceous borders”. They tend to flower in orange, red, pink, yellow and white in early summer; however, their spent heads persist, providing architectural interest for the remainder of the season.
“Hhmmm, I’ll have some of those,” I thought back in September, before realising that the nearest potential stockist is at least 20 miles away – not what you’d regard as an essential journey in the new normal.
Online I could just about find them on sale from retailers based in Britain but none that was shipping to this particular part of the ‘precious union’. They’d seemingly pre-empted the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol long ago and put their own border in the Irish Sea.
The solution thankfully was reasonably straightforward – get them posted to my daughter in Glasgow and she can send them on. They arrived a couple of weeks later complete with paperwork saying they had their EU plant passport. Unfortunately, however, one of the six corms was dead. The other five – the remaining two Eremurus 'White Beauty Favourite' and three Eremurus stenophyllus – all had a firm bulb at the centre of tentacles of fibrous roots, whereas the sixth was soft in the centre and had clearly expired.
I’ve found over the years that the general (sub)standard quality of the goods is a persistent problem with mail order, whether via a catalogue or online. Generally despatched during dormancy, the corms, tubers or bare root perennials are often barely alive and require something akin to plant intensive care in order to be revived. If you are skilled enough to reinvigorate the plant, the feeble specimen that appears usually bears little resemblance to the more vigorous and floriferous one in the picture on the website or in the catalogue.
In my two decades of experience, you can’t beat a local nursery where the plants are reared in conditions and a climate as close as your own as it’s possible to get. While choice may often not be as extensive, the locally grown stock generally compares favourably with mail order alternatives in terms of price. The same tends to apply local nurseries vis-a-vis big garden centres.
News that a replacement corm is now on its way – via Scotland of course – came as it emerged that Brexit is likely to impact even further on the plants and seeds that can be shipped to the north from Britain, not just by mail order but also by garden centres.
As any ‘live’ horticultural products coming across the Irish Sea will be entering the EU’s single market (which Northern Ireland will remain part of), it’ll mean new inspections and paperwork that’ll lead to additional costs that the firms doing the shipping aren’t willing to cover.
Seeds and plants will be required to carry a a health certificate which has to be issued by a qualified plant inspector, who will charge a fee.
Garden centre owners have already voiced their concerns about the impact of the new measures, which would suggest at the very least a reorientation of the market with both customers and retailers looking south rather than east for their supply.
Unfortunately, it will not signal an end of imported garish annuals raised in hothouses in the Netherlands using peat and neonicotinoids but it may mean a greater reliance on using the plant stock we already have and utilising more natives. From a biodiversity and ecological point of view, that can only be a good thing.
