Baytree Garden Centre offers tips for your Cordyline
This week’s column from Baytree Garden Centre’s Mark Cox covers top tips for your Cordyline...
It has been a wonderful few weeks weather wise with plenty of sunshine and rain – though I admit I would have preferred a steady soft prolonged period of rain rather than the biblical downpours we’ve experienced. At one point last week it felt like the end of the world was coming when the sky turned black.
Unfortunately as I don’t own an ark, and to save myself from the impending doom, I dusted off our old rubber inflatable dingy from the cupboard of rubbish (so called as it’s full of objects that I just can’t throw away). As I sat there in the front room in the inflatable flamingo waiting for the flood to arrive, the smell of the rubber and salt transported me back to summer holidays when number one child was small and we would head to beach and play in the sea for hours on end as I dragged her backwards and forwards in the flamingo through the surf. The present Mrs Cox would look up occasionally from her deck chair to acknowledge the screams of delight emanating from excitable child number one.
I sat there in world of my own staring out of the window with my gaze focused on the garden. I couldn’t help but spot the Cordyline which I and number one child had planted together when she was much younger. Sadly during last winter’s really cold spell our Cordyline had given up the ghost and had started dying back.
Perhaps it was just because I was feeling so melancholy, or maybe it was due to the fact that I’d been watching a John Wayne war film that morning where no marine dies on his watch, that I promised myself that if I should survive the impending flood that I should try to see if the Cordyline could be coaxed back into life given the age and my emotional connection I was feeling towards the plant.
Possibly you have a Cordyline which suffered the same fate as mine; if that’s the case then together we might be able to do some good, though this treatment will only work on plants that have been established for quite some time, I’m talking about at least five years old.
The procedure involves cutting away the soft rotting upright to a point just below where you find solid woody growth. If there is none then there’s not a lot you can do other than to dig up the plant and give it a burial on the compost heap. It’s what it would have wanted.
Once you have cut away the dead flesh apply a really good helping of Growmore or, failing that, a good tomato feed to the base of the plant and water it in so that the nutrients can get straight down the roots and absorbed by the patient.
Patience is what is required now, should it survive the operation, time is what it needs to heal. It could take a couple of months for new shoots to appear from the stalk. If that is the case your Cordyline has survived but its shape and form will never be the same, it will be more like a bush now that a tall column with a firework explosion atop.
Some may shoot some may not. If by the end of the summer there are no signs of any new shoots, or the rot that was above the cut we made has taken hold of the plant stem again, then I’m afraid we’ve done all we can and it’s time to buy a new Cordyline.
