I put in my bulb orders today. Buying bulbs by post from a bulb specialist is a supreme exercise in deferred gratification. Choose (and pay) today, the box doesn't arrive for four or five months, and you won't see a flower before February. It is worth getting organised in advance, though, rather than relying on whatever catches your eye in the local garden centre (or B&Q, or Waitrose) come September, because the choice is so much wider, and it can be a lot cheaper. And you hope your bulb merchant has stored the bulbs at the correct temperature, then you can plant them at once, unless they are tulips in which case you can keep them somewhere cool until November. Spending six weeks in a plastic bag at the ambient temperature the garden centre requires to bring in the punters for coffee and cake won't do most bulbs any good at all.
I have stuck with Peter Nyssen again this year for tulips and daffodils. They are so much cheaper than most sources, and their quality is generally very good, though two pots of tulips did fail on me last season. But that could have been the compost or some other problem at my end and I'm not writing them off yet. After several years of collecting Whichford pots my set of the basket weave pots I use for tulips is up to fourteen, which is where it will stick for the time being, and rather than do every pot with a different hot coloured variety, red, orange or yellow, this year I've gone for a new colour scheme, a tasteful (I hope) mixture of soft pink, palest yellow* and ivory, and only three varieties. I love bright tulips and they go brilliantly with the chartreuse flowers of the euphorbia, but after several years of always ordering 'Ballerina' and 'Apeldoorn' it felt like time for a change. Plus, fifty of one variety is Peter Nyssens's trigger point for bringing the unit price down from around thirty pence per tulip bulb to about twenty, with the bizarre result that you can see the total cost in your shopping basket drop as you click on +10 to take your total from forty bulbs to fifty.
The hyacinths will be coming from Kevock simply because I really liked the colour of the variety 'Splendid Cornelia' in their list, and I've tried many of the Nyssen varieties before. I liked them too, but it's fun to experiment. 'Splendid Cornelia' is described as mineral-violet with a violet-purple interior. She comes in packs of thirty, when I only need twenty for my four regular hyacinth pots, but I can find extra pots for the others. In fact, since last year's display was marred by losses, one embryonic flower spike disembowelled for which I blamed the mice, and one more developed flower stem snapped off by either wind or the chickens clambering over the pots, I might try potting some of the surplus individually in three inch pots, like the precarious top-heavy impulse buys you see in garden centres for 99 pence a pop. Then if there are any losses from the main pots I might be able to drop the substitutes into the gaps. That's assuming that given rather different growing conditions they're ready at the same time, reach roughly the same height and so on. It might not work.
Hyacinths for pots are an excellent long term investment, because if planted out into the borders afterwards they live and flower well for years. After more than twenty seasons of doing four outdoor pots each year, plus odd ones for the house, we've got quite a substantial display running through the borders, but I'm sure I can shoehorn in another thirty. The tall bedding tulips are more of a mixed bag, and it depends on the variety and your soil. Peter Nyssen lists the names of some that should last relatively well, and there was a useful article in the Telegraph by Val Bourne which they cite as well. I've been replanting the hot coloured bedding tulips in the dahlia bed provided that the bulbs were still a decent size when I took them out of the pots, and if the mice didn't eat them in storage like they did last year, and that's been just about enough to keep the display going from year to year. I don't know what I'll do with leftover 'Ivory Floradale' and 'Elegant Lady', but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
After I'd finished my bulb orders an email from Bloms Bulbs dropped into my inbox, reminding me that they'd just won their 64th Gold Medal at Chelsea. They did, and a very fine stand it was too, and I enjoyed looking at it. The trouble is, fifty bulbs of the pink and yellow lily flowered 'Elegant Lady' cost £26.90 from Bloms, or £9.00 from Peter Nyssen.
*Yes, I know I keep saying that I don't like pink and yellow together, but that is strong pink and bright yellow. I am working on the basis that pale pink and yellow are different, having fallen for the charms of a variety that combines both in one flower.
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