A Brazilian taster

I've just come back from a monumental trip to the Atlantic rainforest in the State of Sao Paolo. The idea for this came from being blown away by the diversity of birds in the Pantanal and just wanting more of that. I hadn't been back long before I was planning this one for the following year. It did not disappoint. It does of course mean that I am now behind again as I've been back a week and am only now starting to review some of the 3000 photos I came home with. On the plus side I now have something to write about other than the constant watering of my many plants in this hot weather - this has been my life for about a month now and whilst I enjoy it a lot it does not make good blogging. By all accounts it was warmer in Wanstead than it was in Brazil, which I was a little sad to miss. Then again my bird feeder does not have things like this on it. On balance....

Brazilian Tanager

So of the 3000 images I've managed to get down to about 500 after the first pass. This sounds like a lot but actually birding came first, photogaphy a distant second. Most of the 3000 were just feeder session grabs between birding in the incredible forest fragments I was lucky enough to visit, and so will be somewhat unrepresentative of what I actually spent time doing. Nonetheless I reckon there will be enough images of the interior to accompany the words and give a decent feel for the place. Onwards!

A bit drastic

With apologies to anyone who came here for bird news

Agave attenuata is one of favourite plants. Planted en masse it is a wall of soft green architecture. Crucially it lacks the spines of others in its genus that regularly maim me as I move around the garden and the greenhouse. I have something like a dozen plants, all grown from small suckers of larger plants. Mostly on Madeira, where they grow like weeds in huge clumps, but I think I brought some back from the Canaries and mainland Spain on different trips. At that stage they were tiny, perhaps fifteen or so centimetres, possibly smaller than that. Planted in pots here in Wanstead they have thrived, grown quite large, but over the years they have also become extremely leggy, growing horiztonally and becoming rather awkward. I solved this problem by arranging them like a latticework, with the heads of plants growing some distance from their pots, with the stems crossing over one another. It looked vaguely okay until it didn't. For some reason that moment occured this morning. A bit of research on the web to confirm what I already knew. I could chop the top off the leggy stems, some two feet tall at this point, leave the cut to callous over and for a few roots to emerge, and then simply replant upright. What is more the stems will then grow new heads, possibly several, which can then be detached to form new plants. Or that is plan anyway. 

It took a bit of nerve to actually chop the first one and I ended up leaving one intact in case this doesn't work. I have every faith that it will though, succulents are generally a synch. In fact the last two weeks have been all about succulents - dividing bushy plants and replanting, and I think I doubled my Haworthias over the space of an hour or so. For if this rather brutal beheading of the Agave attenuata works, I will end up having doubled the number of plants. Perhaps even quadrupled because I also chopped the several feet of stem that I had taken off into small chunks, all of which have latent root nodes, and which with the proper care will I think root in their own right and create new plants. The heads are currently in empty pots whilst they air heal. I plan to try a couple methods. Some I will plant immediately in a nice succulent mix, others I will leave suspended until they put out roots, after which I will plant them up. Both methods are said to be successful, so let's see which works best. The rootballs and remaining stems look rather sad at the moment, but they have the summer to start anew. Hopefully in a couple of months I will have something to report back on. Other than compost...