It's time to order bulbs for autumn planting. Thinking now about things for the garden that you are not going to plant before August (daffodils) or November (tulips) and won't give you any reward for your trouble before February 2015 at the earliest may not come naturally, but now is the time to act. Leave it too late and the nice things may be gone. In fact, I may already have missed them. It must be two or three weeks since Kevock's email popped up in my inbox telling me that their new bulb catalogue was now available on their website. Then Broadleigh's catalogue arrived just after Chelsea, as it always does, and between them they prompted me to look at the Peter Nyssen website, where it turned out that bulb ordering opened this year in April. Last year it wasn't until June, and the date kept slipping back.
Bulb catalogues are very seductive, as you sit back in your chair and look at the pictures, your imagination perhaps fired up by the flowers that have astonishingly been held back for Chelsea. Where else can you see daffodils, hyacinths, alliums and tulips all in bloom at the same time, not to mention Tritelia, Eremurus, Ixia, Gladiolus and Rhodohypoxis? As Larkin says, you could get them still by writing a few cheques. Or filling in your credit card number. The first time I tried to buy anything from Kevock, they lost my cheque, but we have put that behind us.
It is good to keep a faint grasp of reality, as dreams of beauty beyond reason float before your eyes. First of all, you are going to have to pay for these bulbs. Many bulb suppliers wait to take payment until despatch time, when they know exactly what they have actually got available, so the bill may not arrive for four or five months, but eventually it will be there, on your bank statement or credit card account. All of the two pounds seventy-fives and eleven pounds can add up remarkably.
More to the point, you are going to have to plant them. You may crawl around in the autumn, trowel or bulb planter in hand, scrabbling holes in soil which come September may have set hard as concrete, or be doing its bit to commemorate the mudbath of the Great War, depending on what sort of summer we've had. Or you may pot them up, assuming you have enough pots and somewhere to put them, with the intention of planting them out in the spring of next year, when you can see what else is coming up where, if mice don't find them in their pots and eat them first. Thought of in that way, a hundred bulbs suddenly sounds a lot bigger than ten pounds, which is not really so very much. Think of all the ways you could spend ten pounds without even thinking about it, and now imagine digging one hundred and forty little individual holes in your lawn, dropping a crocus bulb into each of them, and putting each divot of grass back in place. That's how big ten pounds can be, if you spend it on small bulbs.
Of course, if you want to cut down on the work you could spend the entire ten pounds on one rare fritillary bulb, but I don't myself. In the garden I am going for quality, but not rarity. I want good doers, things that will like my ground, withstand the weather and the local pests reasonably well, preferably bulk up, and make a wonderful display. Playing spot the rarity is a perfectly good game, but it is not my game. A thousand Crocus tommasinianus, their pale mauve and purple faces spread wide open to the spring sun, trump two Galanthus krasnovii, even if the latter is a rare species with long, narrow petals flared outwards.
My other sage piece of advice, based on years of succumbing to the siren delights of bulb catalogues, is to keep a note (somewhere you are not going to lose it), not just of what you ordered, but where you intend to put it. Have that place firmly in your mind's eye as you fill out each line of the order form. That way, you will not find yourself come spring wandering around the garden with a barrow loads of pots looking for a home, and realising that you can't give your new bulbs the growing conditions they need, or that they clash hideously with the existing occupants of the garden.
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