more snowdrops

I've been planting more snowdrops.  I dithered about whether to buy any this year, since there are already quite a lot, but the annual crop of newspaper and magazine articles on snowdrop gardens that have got the start of a few decades on me, if not a century, made me realize that we needed more.  This is using the word 'need' in the gardener's sense of want, fully justified on aesthetic grounds.  Obviously I do not need snowdrops in the same sense as I need food, or clean drinking water, or to remain connected to the electricity supply, but I wanted them.  I felt the garden would be more beautiful and complete if various empty corners had snowdrops in them.

I could have split some of my existing clumps, but even the biggest are only just beginning to develop that air of opulence possessed by really well established naturalised displays of snowdrops. I didn't want to whittle them back down to little clumps of three in order to spread what I had more thinly, I wanted more.  In the end I compromised and bought five hundred rather than the round thousand.  They are cheaper per bulb if you get into four figures, but still quite a lot in absolute terms.  I am waiting for somebody to write the story of all the people who have bankrupted themselves making their gardens, but in the meantime I am trying not to join them.

Some of the extra bulbs are for the rose bed below the veranda.  I planted some a couple of years ago in the lower part of the slope where the soil starts to get heavier, and they did surprisingly well, so I thought it would be nice to sweep them across the width of the bed until they reached a natural break where the roses got more dense, and a couple of clipped box domes provide some evergreen mass.  The rest were to fill out edges of the planting in the wood, where the existing display didn't quite reach to places it looked as though it ought, the skirts of holly trees and the bases of various shrubs.  I wasn't going to waste my bulbs planting them in dense dry shade, but I felt as though last time around I hadn't coloured in the page right to the edges.

It's a nice question working out where they are going to take, and where they will dwindle away more or less rapidly.  They won't sit in mud, obviously, but don't like it too dry.  They don't seem to tolerate soil that's already packed with tree roots, but seem fairly relaxed over quite a broad spectrum between stiff clay and quite light, structureless soils.  I've planted more over the years than have survived, using the technique of spreading them fairly thinly in the first year, then going back the next year and thickening up the planting in the areas where I can see they're doing well, making tall clumps and flowering.  If they can only summon the energy to send up a few weedy leaves and no flowers then I don't waste more bulbs in that spot.  After a few years, of course, they may have died out completely from that patch and I may forget they were there and try again, but given the water table moves around and the amount of shade varies as trees grow or topple, that's not necessarily a bad thing.  They seed themselves where they're happy, and the bulbs make offsets, so the display is gradually increasing, but it's still not the torrent, the carpet, the cascade of white that I should like.

I got this year's bulbs from a firm called Chapelgate.  They are not the cheapest, five hundred bulbs setting me back £51 including delivery, but I've used them twice before and been impressed by the speed of delivery and freshness and quality of the bulbs.  This year was no exception.  I placed my order last Thursday and the box arrived yesterday, the bulbs neatly wrapped in bundles of fifty inside sheets of newspaper in polythene bags, leaves still stiff, plants neither dessicated nor wet and slimy.  You may think that the second week of March is late to be planting snowdrops, but I've learned to wait until the existing ones are starting to go over.  However fresh the ones you plant, they always look dishevelled for the rest of the first season they go in, so I don't want to introduce them to the garden display while it is still pristine.  Plus, the longer they have to grow before being lifted the healthier they should be.  The current thinking from the snowdrop experts is that they are best moved in June when they are dormant, but of course then you can't see where the existing ones are.  Moving them as they start to die back is a compromise.  What they hate above all else is to be dried out.