Jubaea chilensis -

 Twenty years ago my husband was working at a Naval Defense Exhibition in Chile and there was a stand selling young Chilean Wine Palms . All certified CITES approved and permission granted for export etc . 

I think his interest was piqued by the word "wine" not that he was thinking of plant crazy me back home in Cornwall .

He proudly carried this onto the plane ,with it's leaves sticking out of its brown box with string handle and it travelled home in the luggage rack above his seat .

Anyway , so being very,  very special to him , he has never allowed me to plant it out into the ground , we have moved house several times and it has always come with us .

Keeping it in this tub , has in effect kept it bonsaied , so to speak , but yesterday he announced that he'd been thinking about it all night and had an idea .

To re-pot it ! 

In my lovely new half barrel ! 

Sigh ......

So I helped him get the barrel over from the workshop  , we kind of rolled it along . 

We then had to have a bit of a think about the exact position it would need to be in .....and the area needed quite a bit of weeding to be done first .

The man who is coming to build the  new workshop and woodshed had kindly sprayed this area for me with weed killer . There is gravel all along here that I had put down to create my rotary washing line area .You can see where the grass is yellow, is where the weed killer was sprayed . 

The man told me he would come back and spray it a couple more times and told me not to touch it . 

Disobeyed !  Got on with it and now it looks nice again !

I put the rotary washing line up and then we realised that with the palm in the barrel , it would grow too big in this area and would brush against all my washing on the line . 

Could we plant it out into the ground somewhere else ? No , he likes it just there . 

In the barrel somewhere else ? In the barrel further back ?

The thing is , where ever it goes , that will be the last time we move it  . It will be too heavy to lift the barrel  full of earth and the palm tree .

So now ...we have to go and work it out again !

                              Here's one I planted earlier !

Got to go ....... we're looking after the grandchildren today  .