deadheading

I have just deadheaded the daffodils in the lawn.  Books and gardening articles say that you should, to preserve the bulbs' energies for flowering next year, all except Christopher Lloyd who said that we deadheaded them to make ourselves feel better.  After all, we didn't deadhead the snowdrops, and they flowered perfectly well the following year.  He's right about snowdrops.  And I don't deadhead any of the small bulbs in the gravel, the dwarf tulips, scilla and Chionodoxa, or the crocus in the bottom lawn, or the grape hyacinths, and they multiply by seeding and still keep on flowering so that the display grows year by year.  Either daffodils are particularly lacking in stamina and need special help, or Christopher Lloyd was right.  One could design a proper trial, with patches of deadheaded and not deadheaded bulbs of different species, and see how they performed the following season, but I'm not going to.

What I am very particular about is leaving the foliage to die down naturally.  Bulbs in pots that are destined for the garden are cleared to one side and left to go on growing for a few more weeks after flowering before being disturbed.  I grow four pots of hyacinths every year, to stand by the formal pond, and move them out into the borders afterwards.  They are extremely long lived plants in the ground, and after more than two decades of planting twenty bulbs (give or take, allowing for mice and weather catastrophes) we have a generous scattering through the front and back gardens. The ideal time to add to the display is when the faded foliage has not quite disappeared, so that you can see where the gaps are.

Tulips are likewise only asked to do one year in a pot, then allowed to die back completely in their containers, while I remember to water them and sometimes even feed them.  Then I empty the pots, and sort through the bulbs, discarding the very small ones.  The bigger ones that are worth keeping to replant are stored dry until November, though there was a glitch last summer when mice found them in the garage and ate half of them.  They go into the dahlia bed nowadays, where as there is no way of telling what's already there I have to take pot luck on the risk of digging up the existing occupants.  The display in the dahlia bed tends to be slightly irregular and gappy, but overall looks cheerful enough and reasonably full, especially with the red and orange stakes. Before I hit on the idea of using the dahlia bed for tulips in the spring I planted some previously potted tulips around the edge of the vegetable patch, in very poor unimproved sand.  Most have vanished without trace, but there is a fine stand of 'Ballerina', a lily flowered variety in a lovely luminous shade of orange.  'Ballerina' is said to be relatively long lived in the soil, as is the pillar box red* 'Apeldoorn', and in this case what is said chimes with my experience here.  It doesn't always.

*  Pillar boxes were originally painted sage green, and were not changed to the familiar red until 1874, according to a website about Anthony Trollope that Google threw up while I was checking to see if pillar box was properly one word or two.  That nugget might come in useful in a quiz, or to fill a conversational lull at a particularly stilted social occasion.  As it is it has filled a paragraph.