Marginal plants

I placed an order with wetland plants http://www.wetlandplants.co.uk/ last week. Otter Nurseries, just outside Exeter, stocks very few marginal and pond plants and they are much cheaper to buy on the internet. Not knowing how the plants would be packaged I gave them special delivery instructions, asking them to leave the plants behind our bin if we weren't at home to receive them. They arrived today, which of course happened to be bin day (so our bin was out on the street), but thankfully they left the box by the house nonetheless.

So after a very long day at work I went out in the not so pleasant cold and drizzle to pot the plants. The drizzle stopped on and off and I soon found that the cold of putting my hands deep in the pond was far worse than the air temperature. Still I was very pleased to get them all out of their newspaper and into their new home. I had previously planned exactly where the plants would go in teh pond, but the weather being bad, the bog garden not being finished and the shelves of the pond not being quite the height I needed them to be I settled for only placing the deep ones in their permanent homes and putting the rest near our new gravelly beach until later in the week.

Most of the plants I've bought for the pond and bog are natives - cotton grass, cuckoo flower, marsh marigolds, yellow flag, water mint etc, but I couldn't resist a couple of non-natives too including Iris Laevigata Variegata, primula japonica and Glyceria maxima variegata. Apologies to my father for not putting the scientific names in italics, but I've been doing that all day and now I'm tired.