Labelling.

I’m not getting any younger and my memory is not what it was. I like to keep track of the names of the many plants that I grow and I am not very good at doing so. The simplest and safest way is to have a label stuck in the ground or attached to the plant.

Buy a plant in a garden centre and it will likely have a professionally produced colour label either hanging from the plant or attached to the pot. It may have, as well as or instead, a label printed by the retailer either tied to the plant or stuck on the pot. Discrete they are not, being more about a point of sale display for the plant, which may not be flowering or may be completely dormant.

There is no shortage of options available for labelling plants and I have used quite a few. White or coloured plastic labels, written on with a marker pen or some form of pencil, can be fairly good or completely hopeless. The writing may fade; I find HB pencil lasts well and recently bought a few Staedtler Lumocolor permanent garden marker pens as they had been recommended as good. Plastic labels can last pretty well but all eventually get brittle. My handwriting isn’t great.

Labelling machines are available, ranging in price from affordable to eyewatering. What I have settled on is a Brother P-Touch GL-H105. I’ve had it since 2017 and haven’t regretted the purchase yet. It is currently on Amazon for about £45. It looks like this.

It will produce one or two lines of print on a 12mm wide label and I have only used tape with black print on a white background. I set the label margin to narrow or it wastes a lot of tape. The printed label I attach to aluminium strip. I use 15 x 2mm anodised aluminium strip which I get in 1m lengths and cut into seven equal lengths if I intend to push them in the ground. I cut them with a hacksaw and file the burrs off. I have occasionally cut shorter lengths which I have drilled and tied to shrubs with wire.

In addition to plant labels in the garden I have used the printer to produce numbers to go on the reverse of the name labels of the Camellias in the collection at Mount Edgcumbe. These have been stuck to the back of the engraved labels. I include the number as part of the engraved information on the front of the label now but historically the accessions were not numbered. The old labels are often covered in algae and while I clean them before affixing the number, I may not have been able to get them completely clean. Some of those numbers have dropped off and I have blamed that on using generic rather than Brother original tape, though in truth I have no record of what type of tape has been used where and most are still attached after several years and must include many of the generic tape versions.

The most recent tapes were purchased from Cartridge People, who are charging £9.90 for TZe-231 Brother original tapes. They have their own brand which are about a third cheaper.