gravel gardening

I haven't finished planting out the potted bulbs, but I have made a decent start.  I began with the gravel garden by the entrance.  Planting anything into gravel is always a fiddly process, since you have to scrape the gravel back from where you want to dig, make your hole without spilling soil over the surface of the surrounding gravel, remove some soil if it's a large pot and there isn't room to spread all the surplus around without creating a mound, plant whatever it is, and scrape the gravel back without burying or breaking off too many leaves in the process.  All this takes longer than dropping bedding into a bare and previously dug-over flowerbed.

First off was Scilla peruviana, three bought bulbs and three smaller plants raised from seed.  When I mention growing bulbs from seed to people they tend to make discouraging noises about how long the bulbs will take to reach flowering size, but I think that's only because they are used to the almost instant gratification of buying ready-to-flower bulbs in a packet.  Many bulbous species that naturalise themselves in our gardens do so at least partly by seeding, and we are very happy to let them.  After all, you don't have to stand over the plant watching while it grows.  Scilla peruviana is a delightful thing, with starry blue flowers decorated with conspicuous yellow stamens.  I used to have a potful once, which is how I got seed, but left it outside over one winter.  Bad mistake.  Mice do not seem to eat the bulbs.  Despite the name it has nothing to do with Peru, but comes from the Western Mediterranean.

Then came Dichelostemma ida-maia.  Mice don't seem to eat the bulbs of that either, since all my pots survived unmolested.  This is an eye-catcher from California and Oregon, which carries clusters of pendulous, tubular red flowers with pale yellow tips on top of lanky stems.  The foliage is not very robust, and in a chaotic garden like mine I think it needs its own space where it will not get accidentally mauled during weeding, or overwhelmed by other plants as the season progresses.  This is my second attempt at growing it, after it got lost first time round.  It wants sharp drainage, sun and summer dormancy, and I am hoping that the gravel will suit it very well.  The flowers in the wild are pollinated by humming birds.  Red tubular flowers from the warmer parts of the Americas often are.

I'm also giving Allium schubertii a go.  It is fairly low growing, as alliums go, and has the most enormous flower heads, which give a star-burst effect as the stems of the individual small flowers making up the head are of different lengths.  Apparently this arrangement operates in the same way as tumbleweed, so that once the head is ripe and dry it will blow a long way, scattering seeds. The flowers don't show to their best advantage if crammed in among herbaceous plants, and I'm hoping they can be persuaded to grow in the gravel for aesthetic reasons.  They hail from the Eastern Mediterranean and should like the good drainage, but the soil may be too poor for them, and I intend to give every bulb a good dusting of fish, blood and bone as soon as I've bought some more.  Though come to that practically everything in the front garden is due to get some FB&B, if I manage to get round to it.

I didn't finish planting the pots of Tritelia ixioides 'Starlight'.  This has open heads of several starry pale yellow flowers, held well apart, and is supposed to favour a dry, sunny position.  The species used to be called Brodiaea, and like the Dichelostemma comes originally from California and Oregon.  Again like the Dichelostemma I tried it in a border, and it seemed to be coping with some of the driest and most arid soil in the entire garden, but was rather lost in the creeping sorrel which was the only thing that really seemed to like that part of the bed.  I am hoping that it will relish having its own space.

As I was weeding I noticed some strong new shoots coming from the base of the Parahebe perfoliata, while the Zauschneria californica are really starting to get into their stride, sending out underground shoots at an increasing distance from the original parent plants.  But I will tell you about them another time.