Monty prepares for a bounty of colour by planting spring bulbs
Monty shares what he’s planting now, to help you enjoy a dazzling display of flowers that will drift through grass, brighten borders and create a colourful parade of pots
Spring bulbs are part of the floral narrative that we try to stretch through our borders from January to November
September always seems to me too early to be planting for next spring. Not because it involves planning ahead – all gardening is set in the future – but because it seems like bad magic to be invoking the spirits of March and April as summer settles its weary bones around the fading fires of September. Spring viewed from September seems like another country. It is a bit like Christmas decorations in October or Easter eggs for sale in February.
But it is good gardening and good sense. Time to get over these seasonal foibles. At the very least, now is the time to check out the catalogues and pictures online of all the possibilities available while garden centres across the land are well stocked with a wide selection, whereas if you leave it till October – as so many of us do – the choice inevitably is reduced. And daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, muscari, eranthis, camassias, early irises, scillas and fritillaries are all best sown in early autumn, if the opportunity and willpower are there.
This does not include tulips. Tulips can and should be ordered now but are best planted in November and December. This reduces the risk of tulip fire because any spores that are in the soil are much less likely to infect the bulbs in colder weather.
Spring bulbs at Longmeadow have three different roles to play. The first is part of the floral narrative that we try to stretch through our borders from January to November. For the early months, they play the starring role but then, as spring gathers pace, are balanced by an increasing number of herbaceous perennials and flowering shrubs – so, by May, when the Jewel Garden is in full-rigged sail and the relative sparseness of spring seems unimaginable, they’re often playing a supporting role. But in the simpler spaces of the Spring and Writing Gardens, or in woodland areas, such as the Coppice and Wildlife Garden, it’s much easier to understand the effect that these dry little bulbs will have when flowering next March and April. The Writing Garden has hundreds of the glorious white daffodil ‘Thalia’, as well as summer snowflake, Leucojum aestivum, and we top these up every autumn.
Sometimes, however, you must be careful what you wish for. ‘Thalia’ is pretty robust and spreads well so a bit of judicious thinning every few years corrects the balance. But the spread of ‘Thalia’ is as nothing compared to the voracious Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ in the Jewel Garden. We initially planted a few hundred bulbs about 20 years ago but now there must be thousands. Every time you make a planting hole you uncover dozens of bulbs. We dig up and throw away barrowloads of bulbs every year and yet it is still present in great drifts. This is not to say that it is not spectacular – but can be slightly too much of a good thing.
A second sitting
The second batch of bulbs are those we plant into grass. These are increasing year on year and are now every bit as important a spring display as the border bulbs. We began by planting 100 bulbs of wild daffodils, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, in the orchard. There were only nine flowers in the first year and they were very slow to spread, but now they are well established and the hundreds that delicately swathe in and amongst the apple trees have been joined by Narcissus poeticus, or ‘pheasant’s eye’, and white camassias, C. leichtlinii ‘Alba’, and Allium nigrum, all planted last September and joined by the tulip ‘Yellow Spring Green’, planted in November. I shall add more camassias and alliums this year, as they look particularly good in the long grass.
The cricket pitch is underplanted with thousands of crocuses, which look spectacular in February – if the rabbits don’t eat them – but are nearly always over by the time we start filming. However, we have also planted snake’s-head fritillaries
(Fritillaria meleagris), more wild daffodils,
Allium atropurpureum and the delicate blue Camassia cusickii.
Most spring bulbs do best on welldrained soil but fritillaries, camassias, snowdrops and snowflakes all thrive in damper soil and we grow these in the strip between the Damp and Cottage Gardens. Last year this was a canal for weeks on end, but none of the bulbs seemed to mind in the least and all have flowered well.
When growing any bulb in grass it is essential that the grass is left uncut until the last piece of bulb foliage has died right back, otherwise next year’s flowers will be severely limited and, in time, disappear altogether. In practice, that usually means waiting until July or even early August. We then keep the grass short which makes planting fresh bulbs in September a lot easier – although the September soil can be very dry and hard, and we sometimes leave the hose soaking into it for a few hours the day before to soften it up.
When planting bulbs in a border you can be specific and place them individually,
September seems too early to be planting for next spring but it’s good gardening and good sense
Bulb growing is remarkably easy – make a hole, stick them in, then forget about them
although we often use the square-metre system. This involves dividing each border into square metres, marked out with canes, then allocating the same number of bulbs to each square. These are then planted around whatever else might be growing there. The result gives you an equal balance of bulbs but an irregular and natural spread as you plant around and among the herbaceous perennials and shrubs.
But in grass by far the best method is to simply throw a handful of bulbs on the ground and plant wherever they land, otherwise you invariably end up with the flowers appearing in spring in a regimented, stiff arrangement. I have found that investing in a high-quality, long-handled bulb planter saves a lot of time and effort. It will take out a core of turf and soil, and you pop the bulb in, then you make another hole, which forces out of the planter the core from the first hole – which you use to refill that – and so it goes on. This way you can plant hundreds of bulbs relatively quickly, easily and deeply, and the end result looks as though the turf has barely been disturbed. Depth is important with all bulb planting and, as a rule, the deeper the better. In practice, aiming for twice the depth of the bulb is the minimum.
If daffodils in grass grow healthy and vigorous foliage but few, if any, flowers, it’s usually a sign of two problems. The first is over-congestion, which you can remedy by digging them up in late spring and replanting, with their foliage, at a wider spacing. Secondly, the bulbs could be too dry when they start to break into active growth underground. Watering dry turf in early autumn, where you know the bulbs are to appear, can help with this.
Colourful containers
The last way that we use bulbs is in containers. We now have scores of these, ranging from terracotta pots of exquisite, but tiny, irises to giant pots holding three layers of different tulips with 20 bulbs to a layer – all topped by wallflowers.
Between these two extremes we grow lots of small daffodils, like ‘Tête-à-tête’, ‘W.P. Milner’, ‘Minnow’ and ‘Hawera’, as well as fritillaries, muscari, scillas, chionodoxa and hyacinths. These are then stored in a covered cold frame to protect them from becoming sodden with Longmeadow rain, but with the sides open and un-heated so they can be exposed to cold, which helps to trigger their flowering. As the shoots appear and flower buds form, we bring them out and display them en masse in a tableau outside the potting shed and all over the garden, giving bright spots of colour from late January to mid-May.
When growing bulbs in pots, it is really important to give them good drainage and the best way to do this is to buy a bag or two of horticultural grit and mix it in equal measure with a peat-free compost. The only exceptions are fritillaries, which like a more moisture retentive compost, and hyacinths, which love a loose, open compost that is best provided either by a coarse bark mix or by adding plenty of home-made leafmould.
But in the end, all bulb growing is remarkably easy. You make a hole in the ground and stick them in, preferably pointy end up. Then forget about them until they start to show their snouts of shoots early in the year – when you know it’s not long before they’re going to explode into colour.