The other Saturday we spend most of the day at an event at the Crystal Palace Subway. You’ve a good few stairs to traverse and have to squint until your eyes gets used to the light when you get into the covered area but it’s an interesting place to view. More on the venue on a great YouTube clip here.

On nipping back and forth from said event (to get supplies of bacon sarnies and cups of tea that had to be consumed outside as the organisers didn’t want the subway’s floor to be discoloured) we spotted a plant stall set up outside the park belonging to a local community gardening group. The selection was wide and the prices cheap so what more do you want? We spent a tenner and got a good handful of plants.

All the pots came with details of the plant printed on paper sellotaped to the side, so we were in no doubt what they initially were until we took them out of said container. We’ve now forgotten three apart from a large lily and another Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ we bought to stick up by the pond.

The first one (above) is not a dock but is very close to one (the new garden volunteers regularly mistaken it for the weed) and supposedly sends up long flowers or seed heads perhaps? Any ideas what we purchased or have we been diddled into buying a dock for a quid?

The next we wrote on a label but the only pen on hand was a silver thick marker and we can’t really make it out properly (could it be Sweet Rocket?) We are sure when we first read up about the plant it said it was invasive, so we just left it in the pot.

The last one (above) Plant.id reckons this is Atriplex hortensis aka Purple Mountain Spinach. We recall being told something like that (French Spinach perhaps?) at the time but not 100% on that. We think we’ve done well for a tenner but just unsure about the names on the last three. Any thoughts on what they are would be appreciated.

Here’s an excellent chilled out tune we found last week on our search for “space” tracks, that is perfect for a Sunday morning. It’s by Space Afrika out of Manchester and called Self.

And another track called Bobbies Reprise (feat. bobbieorkid) from Rainy Miller x Space Afrika. Well worth investigating further.

STOP PRESS! Thanks to all invoved in the excellent Go Gardening Facebook group (Including Graham P, Jane H and Jackie M) for IDing a couple of the plants above.

Plant picture 1 – The dock looking thing is Persicaria. “It’s a perennial & once established spreads quite rapidly. It sends up tall..usually red…flower stalks with small flowers.”

Plant picture 2 – Sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis) “it’s a biennial or short lived perennial.”