I ordered tubers from J Parkers Wholesale in Europe. The tubers from them and Sarah Raven are sold in whole plants, not divided into single tubers. Consequently the plants come in bags with broken necks , damaged, and in some cases dried up.
I guess the theory is that you get a multiple shoot plant from the whole plant, and a bigger plant. What you actually get is the work of chopping off the broken necked tubers, and all the thread like roots, and sometimes you end up with bigger tubers.
There is the additional problem that if you don't tidy up the tuber, you are planting something damaged , and it may rot much more easily. When you tidy up what you get you end up with a bag of blind tubers like these:
When you have tidied up the tuber it may end up looking like this. I dare not take any more off, but this looks busted out to me.
The tubers may be dry, like these , from a very reputable supplier of previous years ( and yes I have written to them and they sent me three more)
In the USA the single tuber, beautifully packed in slightly moist ultrafine peat seems to be the norm, like this one from Swan Island.
They may all grow, but I know which model I prefer, the USA model, easier to handle, easier to plant. I have sent photographs to the European suppliers so they can save on postage, get more tubers from a plant, and store product more easily. I am surprised they don't already do this.
Anyway, most are planted, but I think I will cut up the ones I have left , and the forty or fifty I left in the ground under different storage conditions, and cut them up into separate tubers as taught by Frank Richards among others.
Have a great season, lets see the photographs.
By the way, have you ever seen as many ladybirds as are in the gardens already. We had an exceptionally mild winter, with more rain than seen since records began 250 years ago, maybe four days of light frost, and as a result the garden is bounding ahead, and we are rattling with insect pests and friends.
These little fellows were sitting on top of a 6ft Echium Pininana, which looks like it will flower spectacularly this year. The flower spike will probably put on another four feet or so.
All the best,
