Susie’s Garden
It may feel like ages until next spring, but now is the perfect time to start thinking about blooming lovely bulbs!
There are naked ladies in my flower bed! That’s another name for autumn crocus, a pretty pink bulb that flowers in September without any foliage, the leaves coming up months later during spring. Its proper name is Colchicum autumnale and, though beautiful, it is also very poisonous.
However, spring is on my mind at the moment because I am going through the bulb catalogues, choosing what to plant for flowering next year. It’s a good thing to do on a wet day with a cup of tea and a cat on my lap. I buy bulbs in bulk as it’s so much cheaper and you can group together with friends or as an allotment association to order larger quantities.
Each year I plant new tulips but I try to go for varieties that will naturalise as I really haven’t the time to dig them up after flowering, dry, store them and replant again in autumn. My favourite tulips are the kind that will last year in, year out, and even increase – varieties like “Spring Green”, “Abu Hasan” and “Apeldoorn” and the species Tulipa tarda and Tulipa sprengeri which will self seed. Plant them deeply, at least 6 ins, with some grit under the bulbs.
Although I will add tulips to my bulb order now, I won’t plant them until November to help prevent the disease tulip fire. Before that, though, the daffodils will go in and I’ll be adding more of the little wild daffodils so they can seed themselves in the woodland border. These are the daffodils that Words worth wrote about in his poem having seen them on the side of Lake Ullswater.
Some bulbs are very small in size making them fiddly to plant individually. For pretty little scillas, snakes’ head fritillaries or chinodoxas, just rake off an area of a border, scatter them so they look natural and put the soil back on top. If you want spring crocus to look natural in grass, lift slices of turf, sprinkle the bulbs and replace the turf. It’s a bit of garden magic, planting dry brown bulbs and watching them burst into life and colour come the spring.