Garden view
“Bulb shopping is my guilty pleasure,” says Helen Billiald
Each spring my garden reminds me of my state of mind the previous autumn. Some years it’s a sorry tale of haste and disarray, other years I’m grateful (and faintly surprised) to discover signs of foresight and planning. I’m talking, of course, about bulbs: those miracle papery packages of fireworks-inwaiting. While seeds carry with them a degree of uncertainty (will you remember to sow them? Prick them out? Harden them off? Plant them out? Protect them from slugs?), with bulbs the questions are far simpler and the results more certain: did you buy them? Did you plant them? If the answer is yes in both cases you can be pretty certain of some flowers next spring. Considering the generous odds of reward, why on earth am I not more on-the-ball about planting them every year? Perhaps it’s a case of option paralysis. Give me a catalogue by Broadleigh or Avon Bulbs (other nurseries are available) and I’ll be dreaming and scheming for weeks. Suddenly, unexpected plants seem the most intriguing and essential of purchases. Here I am buying Fritillaria pallidiflora (like small yellow crown imperials), sapphire-coloured reticulate irises and pink star-shaped chionodoxa. Bulb buying carries with it the same pleasure as rummaging through a box of antique textiles or costume jewellery.
Pick ‘n’ mix
With all this beauty available, the real challenge lies in restraint. Experience has shown that buying too many different cultivars in small numbers leads to a garden that looks as though I’ve coughed out the contents of a pick ‘n’ mix shop. Bulbs also have a curious habit of disappearing unless you’ve planted them with a generous crowd of lookalike friends. Five tulips won’t cut it, 100+ most certainly will. If you think of planting 20 tulips per square metre, that number no longer seems so startling. My solution is to be generous with one or two plants each year, and mitigate my own magpie tendencies by planting small numbers of other bulbs in pots. In a good year I’ll have a dozen or so teeny spring pot displays, carefully planted and kept in a cold greenhouse or by a sheltered wall ready to move, immaculate, to the front steps when their moment to shine arrives. Nothing raises the spirits on a soggy winter day like a pot of iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’ (inset) on the doorstep, reassuring you that brighter days will come. Occasionally it’s the big plantings that run perilously late. Who else forgets how long it takes to naturalise bulbs in grass? Digging a loose friable border soil has nothing on the pastime of hacking out divots from the stony sward that you foresaw optimistically as a spring bulb meadow. Rest assured your future self will thank you for doing it. Little else reminds you so clearly that gardening is a memory game. We embroider the same piece of cloth year after year, with the added frisson of certain stitches taking turns to be invisible. Last year I forgot about a prior planting of tulip ‘Ballerina’, meaning my new swathe of pale coffeepink ‘La Belle Époque’ was in for a rather jazzy orange neighbour!
Helen Billiald is a garden writer with a Phd in ecology and an Msc in Pest Management. she’s looking forward to seeing what mistakes she’s made this year
Suddenly, unexpected plants seem intriguing and essential