snowdrops

The Systems Administrator returned from Cheltenham, having had a good time catching up with old acquaintances, and hoarse with shouting after staking the modest winnings of the first three days on Synchronised at 8 to 1.  That made this year's festival self-supporting financially, after paying for the cottage, the petrol to get over there, and some extra seats for friends.  It's sort of a pity that Kauto Star didn't win, what with him being a legend in the making, and Christy Moore's The Ballad of Ruby Walsh being our new favourite song, but there you go.  I'm glad I didn't go, as I really don't like it when horses are killed, and this was a dreadful year for casualties.

The rain had lifted to a light drizzle by after lunch, so I set out to plant my 1000 common and 100 double snowdrops.  If they don't go in this weekend I won't be able to do it until Thursday, and I don't want them to sit sweating in their plastic bags for that long if I can help it.  I got this year's plants from a little family firm called Chapelgate Bulbs.  I hadn't used them before, but their website had a good feel to it, and I'd rather buy direct from a grower than via an internet retailer, as the plants should spend less time hanging around after lifting.  Chapelgate sent me an e-mail to alert me when the snowdrops were dispatched, and they arrived very neatly packed and looking healthy and fairly fresh.  In an ideal world I've have started planting them on Thursday afternoon when they arrived, and finished the job yesterday (they'd have gone back into the ground sooner and it wouldn't have been raining then) but in the real world you do gardening jobs when you can.

The double snowdrops are for the ditch bed in the back garden.  I've planted half of them so far, reflecting regretfully as I did so that their dying leaves are going to look tatty for a while, just as the primroses and violets are springing into life.  Bulbs that have been lifted in growth nearly always die down faster than undisturbed ones, unless you can replant them incredibly quickly, and this is why I leave ordering snowdrops until the main display is going over, so as not to spoil the look of the existing plants by dotting new and wilting ones among them.  The back garden is looking very nice, at ground level.  I've planted as many violets as I could afford every year for years, in a range of colours, and they are starting to seed themselves about quite generously.  The same applies to primroses, and this year a jolly little pink flowered corydalis has seeded lavishly around the border.  The Anemone blanda are just coming out, as is Omphalodes verna.  Some unspeakable creature has eaten most of the leaves of my smart evergreen ginger, but overall it's a good display, and getting ever closer to my ideal of an intricate sheet of mingled low growing plants, which between them will smother out weed seedlings before they have a chance.  Indeed, the Omphalodes is so vigorous that it is within a hair's breadth of starting to become a nuisance.  Unfortunately this year there is another fine embryonic crop of goose grass, so I need to weed that out.

The single snowdrops are for the wood, some to go where the rhododendrons were, the idea being that we will look out of the bedroom window on to a carpet of snowdrops, and some to bulk up existing groups.  My method of planting snowdrops in the wood is to space little groups of two or three bulbs at 30-45cm apart in the first instance, and see how well they do.  Areas where they bulk up quickly, make big fat leaves and look happy and healthy are clearly good places for them, and in subsequent years I can fill in the gaps.  Places where they only make miserable small leaves and never flower a couple of year down the line must be wrong for them in some way, too dark, too dry, too wet, or too something.  Bulbs can have very definite ideas about where they will and won't go.  It is fascinating to walk through a long-established bluebell wood (bluebells in Essex are frequently associated with ancient woodland.  This is not true across the whole country) and see how the bluebells grow in patches, thick as grass in some places and completely absent in others, often with sharp demarcation lines between the two.  They are a plant map of changing growing conditions on the woodland floor.  I reckon there's no point in lovingly dobbing in snowdrops ever 15cm at great effort and expense, if they are going to dwindle and die out over subsequent years.

There is a risk with this method that if they fail completely then after a few years I'll forget I ever had snowdrops there, and try again in the same place.  On the other hand, conditions change over the years as trees grow or die, and the water table is unstable, so places that were unsuitable five years ago might be fine now.  I hope that over the years, as they fill the areas where they are happy and I learn to leave the places where they aren't alone, that they will look increasingly un-planted and natural, like the bluebells do, which appear utterly right and at home in their setting, as of course they are.

When I did smoked mackeral pate on rye bread for the music society, the SA expressed a wistful desire for smoked salmon on rye.  Fortunately there is some of both left from yesterday, so we will have posh nibbles before our supper tonight.  That doesn't happen very often.