Planting bulbs may be messy and uncomfortable, but the results are worth the effort

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Underground movement (Filed: 02/11/2002)

Planting bulbs may be messy and uncomfortable, but the results are worth the effort, says Fred Whitsey How to get the best from your bulbs

With one voice, the team of gardeners answered with an enthusiastic "weeding!" when asked their favourite tasks. But when we were invited to give our least favourite occupation on the ground, we all said "planting bulbs". Gardeners are incorrigibly perverse. Tulip Tulips: worth the effort

The job has to be done in a prolonged crouching position, when the soil is either too dry or too wet for comfort. The hole required is often too deep for the trowel, too small for the spade.

It has to be done amid growth that either splashes you with its decaying dampness or pricks your eye or your hand because it is so dry. And often it takes place in the low light of the declining days. How can we enjoy it?

But we ought to, because there is so much promise in every little bulb. In an age of designer presentation and ready-prepared meals, the garden bulb remains the supreme example of clever packaging.

Within its scales, its rough "tunic" or its dense tuber it carries flower and leaf in mature, if embryonic, form, all ready to perform its best in response to lengthening days the very next spring. It is truly instant gardening.

More than that. In many instances the bulb you plant this autumn could produce 100 more, even 1,000. Most bulbs seem determined to increase as well as please. Some shorten the winter by flowering even before Spring arrives. Moreover, they retire gracefully from view once their glory days are over, leaving few disfiguring relics behind them.

How to get the best from your bulbs

Daffodils Unless you have a paddock, a meadow or an orchard do not go all Wordsworthian and plant daffodils in grass. To be sure of another season's flowering you have to leave the foliage for at least a month before removing it.

By that time the grass can have grown up round them together with rank weeds, and when you can safely mow you will be left with a yellow mat that can take another month to turn green again. Instead, set them in borders where the foliage of returning herbaceous plants will soon close over the daffodil leaves.

Many of the newer daffodils, like the split corona type, look so sophisticated that they would be out of place anywhere but planted in a smart courtyard. So with a country garden we grow them in big pots, 10 bulbs to each. We bring them onto the paved terrace when they are budding. They have to be turned every few days otherwise the flowers all look away from you, the perennial trouble with daffodils growing anywhere near the sunny side of a house.

Tulips Face the truth about tulips too: their mortality rate is appalling. Though with their infinitely varied colourings and their range of form they offer us more scope for painting with plants than any other garden flower, they give their all in the first year and are unreliable the next. Some come up and flower, others don't.

At £10 a bunch the irresistible parrot, fringed and lily-flowered tulips are more expensive - when you can get them - than the year-round florists' lilies. So we grow them for cutting in a three-season cycle in rows on an abandoned vegetable plot where it does not matter if they perform or not. But the big pot treatment would also suit them.

Snowdrops Plant snowdrops in shady spots where they will rapidly increase by seed and offsets. Most other little bulbs are best in full view where they will either seed or make ever-fattening clumps.

Crocuses Since crocuses flower when the weather is at its worst, it is worth planting them in sight of the house or lining a path you use every day. You will need plenty of them. To save money and still let them make their mark plant not two inches apart, as growers advise, but with six to eight inches in between. As you will look at them sideways on they will still appear massed.

The most prolific self-sower and the best value is Crocus tommasinianus. In just a few years its lavender flowers will spring up in large patches and from every nook and cranny that can support a seed. It is rivalled, though not surpassed, by blue scillas and blue and white chionodoxa. Make it a priority to plant all three.

Dwarf varieties Little tulip species sold for the rock garden, as though everyone had one, are alluring but a problem. They are fussy, demanding both perfect drainage and a summer baking. We grow them in the dry impoverished soil round our evergreens in pots. We do the same with miniature daffodils and little irises which appreciate the same treatment. We also grow the iris right up close to bits of summer walling. All get a showing in pots that spend the winter in a frame and are brought, when in bud, into the conservatory.

The bulb planting season is brief, but the flowering term lasts from early February until the end of May. It is such a stupendous garden event that one must devise every possible stratagem to exploit them - so hang the cost and discomfort.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002


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