A colleague put me on to this recently - Suzanne Simard's TED talk on how trees communicate. Plant communication is a fascinating area of study and I initially got into this by reading Lyall Watson's observations in his book Dreams of Dragons. Anyway, it's well worth a watch.   A.

I just got back from a two week holiday and although I have quite a few plants growing in pots in the garden I didn't really give them much though on leaving as we nearly always has some degree of wet weather here in Bristol. Also, most of the pots have a tray of some description to retain water from rainfall or watering. Most of the time I worry about the plants being too wet as some of the trays I have are just old kitchen bowls etc that have turned up from somewhere and have been used for mixing compost with pearlite or grit etc when potting up. As I've introduced a new plan I've grabbed one of these...