I am so thrilled with the fresh new uncluttered look of our website that I thought I would kick off 2023 with the story of the long journey to get it to this point.
It’s hard to imagine that as recently as the early 2000’s, websites were a virtually unknown marketing tool. Robert, an avid radio listener, excitedly told me of an interview he heard which extolled the virtues of a website for increasing sales. My friend Manja Williams, photographer par excellence, volunteered to design something for Petal Faire Nursery.
My interest was piqued, but I was of course a complete novice. Work began with a “coordinator” (for want of a better word) who found me a hosting company and taught me some basics like how to alter text, but I still depended on others for site maintenance and updates. Over the next few years I paid purported experts a great deal of money in exchange for an equal amount of grief and frustration but little in the way of sales. I was approached by all and sundry to upgrade/redesign my website – including one young man who suggested having a roaring lion in one corner of the screen as the website opened!
Then in 2008, I stumbled across the Alt-enter team and web designer Juan Landman from Synapse Studio. At last, Petal Faire’s new digital platform was near perfect, and I did eventually learn how to run the website like a pro.
All went well until the design demands of smart phones entered the picture. There was a half-baked effort to make the website mobile-friendly but I doggedly ignored all advice to the contrary and stuck to my father’s maxim of “if it ain’t [completely] broke, don’t fix it.” In October last year, my hosting company forced my hand by informing me that my website was too outdated for them to continue supporting it efficiently. My original designer Juan proposed a whole new website but I baulked at the thought of starting all over and we agreed on a re-design. I couldn’t be happier!
It was a slow and sometimes painful process but by about 2017-18, the online orders Robert and his radio personality had assured me of started to come in. And today I can say that we are really reaping the rewards of being online, with a constant stream of orders on a weekly basis.
IN THE GARDEN
Readers in Gauteng will agree wholeheartedly as I bewail the hellish heat we have endured for the past few weeks. With any luck, the reasonably consistent forecasts of rain as we move into February will turn out to be accurate.
The garden is looking good in spite of the heatwave and there is still some lovely colour. Along with our regular midsummer prune, we were forced to cut back and remove plants that have outgrown their allocated spaces.
Jasminum Grand Duke of Tuscany
Thunbergia battiscombe
Sphaeralcea
IN THE NURSERY
Click here to view all the plants in this newsletter.
Indigenous plants
Begonia sutherlandii is a hardy soft tuberous bulb that has lovely small orange-red flowers all season and which works well in containers. It is deciduous but is easily propagated from small bulblets that form on the soft stems later in the season. It wants moist shady conditions and acid soil.
Another plant that likes moist conditions and can tolerate even deep shade is Impatiens hochstetteri. This soft hardy deciduous perennial has small pink flowers all season, grows about 50cm high, and spreads by re-rooting. I recently saw this used extensively in a very cold garden in Irene. Annette Ferreira tells me that it dies down in winter and resprouts with gusto in spring. Gorgeous.
Grewia flava, on the other hand, needs full sun and dry sandy soil. A floriferous shrub with grey bark and greyish green leaves, its clusters of yellow flowers in summer attract birds and butterflies. It is evergreen and very hardy, and grows on average 2m high.
Sclerochiton kirkii is an upright 80cm high shrub with attractive small glossy leaves and large sky blue flowers from summer to autumn. Evergreen and hardy, it is happy in shade to semi-shade.
Exotic plants
Euphorbia wulfenii is a well-shaped evergreen and very hardy shrub with purplish stems, grey-green leaves, and yellow-green florets and nectar glands. It grows about 1m high and attracts butterflies and birds during the summer. Plant in dry sandy soil, in sun to semi-shade.
Geranium dalmaticum is a mat-forming evergreen floriferous perennial with rosettes of basal leaves and pretty long-stalked lilac flowers from summer to autumn. It is tough and very hardy, reaches an average height of 30cm, and is happy in sun to semi-shade.
If you enjoy something a little out of the ordinary, consider the spider lily, Hymenocallis littoralis. This is a hardy evergreen clump-forming bulb with a basal rosette of dark green straplike leaves and frilly edged white flowers from summer to autumn. Tough and waterwise, it likes sun or semi-shade.
The soft-stemmed 25cm high bulb Zephyranthus candida is one of those plants that multiplies well. Evergreen and semi-hardy, it has crocus-like white flowers from summer and autumn. It is happy in sun or semi-shade, but wants moist soil.
SNIPPETS
If we don’t move some of our four-month old Seabright bantams off the property, we will soon have no garden to speak of! Contact me if you would like to purchase a few to take them off our hands. They are so precious - but too much of a good thing is not necessarily wonderful.
Our Seabrights
If you are starting to think about your winter garden, make a note that we are planning our first Open Weekend in quite a while at the end of February, beginning March. Details will be sent in the next few weeks.
Happy gardening!
Leoné
082 482 0257