Christmas definitely over

Yesterday afternoon, I planted our Christmas tree,  a 'Baby Blue' spruce, out in the back garden. Took about an hour all told, what with chopping out a hole with the mattock, mixing up some sand & compost and so on and so forth. Didn't water it in, as I would usually, given all the recent rain. Lost half a barrow of yellow clay down the bottom easily enough.

The first time we have done such a thing, having alternated in an irregular way between fake and root-free real for near fifty years now. This one came in a gallon pot from Sainsbury's, having been grown in Germany. The thin, brown plastic pot cut off the small root ball easily enough and I wondered whether it had been grown in some special way for this particular market - rather in the way that our Christmas sage in a pot from Waitrose had clearly been grown in a special way. A special way that meant that the young leaves from the pot were a lot less sagey than the old leaves from the garden - except that there were very few of these last left. 

We shall see how Baby Blue gets on in the months ahead. Maybe it will be OK. It shed very few needles during its fortnight stay inside and Wikipedia says that this particular sort of spruce does indeed have a surprisingly small & shallow root ball for what can be quite a big tree.

Assuming it survives and thrives, digging it up again at the end of the new year is not the plan. Perhaps BH will allow me to plant a row of them, one a year.

Wikipedia also says that the proper name is Picea Pungens, presumably Latin for stinking spruce, while the ticket from Sainsbury's says 'A Picea'. Not sure if the A is the abbreviation of a family name or an indefinite article. Perhaps the latter, as Wikipedia has nothing in its full name starting with 'A'.

PS: regarding plants in pots, I might add that there was a claim in the latest NYRB that the oldest pot plant in the world is an Eastern Cape giant cycad (Encephalartos altensteinii), which has been living under glass at Kew Gardens for getting on for 250 years. I wondered about bonsai and a few clicks got me to reference 2 where there were entirely plausible claims that there are bonsai which are a lot older than that. And I am pleased to be able to say that I have actually seen the one in the US with my own eyes, just one of the very fine collection of same at the National Arboretum in Washington DC, just off the eastern end of H Street. Presumably the people at Kew don't count bonsai pots as pots. Query with them awaiting answer.

Not much else for me in this particular number of the NYRB. 

Reference 1: https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/oldest-pot-plant-in-world-eastern-cape-giant-cycad.

Reference 2: https://www.oldest.org/nature/bonsai-trees/.