The new year brings spring catalogues from Broadleigh Gardens and Avon Bulbs. I see that this year will be the last that Broadleigh exhibit at Chelsea, as owner Lady Skelmersdale has decided that 40 Chelsea exhibits will be enough. I have been to every Chelsea since the mid 1980s. If I were to go down to the garage and check my boxes of old RHS magazines I suppose I could work out the exact year I started, but I think I narrowly pip the Systems Administrator's record of continuous attendance at every Cheltenham race meeting since 1987. That means I've seen over 25 of Broadleigh's stands. They have always been wonderful, and I shall miss them. I can still remember Beth Chatto's exhibits, skilful displays of naturalistic planting, and she packed in Chelsea a good few years ago. Still, I suppose somebody has to retire to make room for new blood.
The agapanthus are tempting. Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus. She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size. When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away. It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.
The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well. This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds. If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots. No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.
Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.) It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen. I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier. One looks a bit lonely. Stingy, even. Maybe I should have several. The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several. Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).
I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops. They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen. But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden. And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them. Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours. I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.
Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless. £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'. I think not. They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower. That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer. I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring. The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging. I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year. Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then. The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second. At least I have a greenhouse. Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.
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