Beautiful plants but delicate (Lupins)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Lupins
Date:	17/08/09 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lovely foliage as well as colourful flowers and interesting seed-heads

Disadvantages: Lupins are a magnet for garden slugs and snails

I like big, brightly coloured plants - perennials, for preference, since I don't go for all that 'bedding plants, nemesias - tuberous begonias - surfinas, pop 'em in a planter and wait for them to die' malarkey. Something with interesting foliage and large gaudy flowers, preferably in clashing colours; a plant that grows tall and reliably comes up year after year is what I'm after - so given all that in theory I should love lupins. Hypothetically, I do.

My mother had some lovely pink and purple ones in her garden just after my parents first moved into their house, and I know for a fact that it took her years and years of chipping away at that lupin's giant root-stock to finally make the plant succumb (so that presumably, she could transform the space where it had once been into a plug-ugly failing veg plot since that is what they've got there in its place)....so from that I had always assumed that lupins are pretty easy to grow.

But this is about my fifth year of trying to get the blessed things established in my own garden, and after another recent failure, I've basically had to give up.

They're horribly vulnerable to slug-attacks, is what I've found. I've bought lupins from the nursery and the garden centre at all stages of development; I've planted them here, I've planted them there, trying all different parts of the garden, both front and back: I've surrouned the tender plants with slug-deterring grit and plastic barriers and eggshells, I go out at night with a torch, collect the slugs in a flower pot and move them a hundred yards down the road - but still sooner or later the lupins all get munched. The latest smallish lupin plant I bought - after vowing that this year, I wasn't going to bother trying with lupins in the first place - would've been a gorgeous burgundy-red flowered variety, so lovely that I couldn't resist it, and I was trying to 'harden that off' - ie to grow it to a slug-resistant size in a separate, isolated pot before planting it in the garden.

But I came back from a few days away yesterday and for a long time, couldn't even find which of the pots had had the red lupin in it. The slugs had gnawed through not just the above-ground foliage, but had chomped right down into the stem, taking every trace of plant material that would've been visible from the surface, right down to well below the soil-line. It was like those hollow imprints of fossil shells you sometimes find on the beach, only in this case, just a hole in the soil showing where the stem of a lupin plant had once been was left in the pot.

I know there's an easy solution to this - slug pellets - but I'm not in favour of poisoning things in principle so that's out. I can't believe that 'cottage garden'-type plants like lupins could only be grown 'in them days' because they were all using slug pellets, so there must be some secret for lupin-growing success, but so far, personally I've yet to find it.

Summary: Waste of time and money in my garden