finally shopping in the sales

When I got up this morning, and wound the bathroom blind up, it didn't look too bad out of the window.  Grey, yes, but I thought that maybe the rain that was forecast yesterday evening hadn't made it this far east.  Going out to let the chickens into their run, I discovered that I was mistaken.  It was raining, a gentle steady silt of water, the sort of rain that if you were to dash outside for a minute you could deceive yourself into thinking that it was nothing much, but if you were to work in it for half an hour you would be soaked.

At least it meant I sat down to the third re-write of the garden guide without the feeling that I was missing out on doing anything more exciting.  It is supposed to read as though the visitor had somebody friendly, chatty and knowledgeable walking beside them (someone, in other words, just like me) but I've now read it so many times that I can't tell how it would seem, if you were coming to it cold.  I think it's OK.  The next step will be to send it off to the people who are going to print it, and we'll find out if it is far too long and needs to be cut down.  The owner is using the same firm that designed the website, to get a unified look for the business, and presumably because she is used to working with them.  They provided text for the website when it was first set up, which was written in a sort of mangled estate agent speak and was truly awful, so we ought to be able to do better than that.  I have discovered, though, that if you want to avoid sounding like a magazine advertising feature, you do tend to end up rather jolly and hearty like the Boden catalogue.

Then I ordered some pots from the Whichford Pottery.  In recent years they've done a January offer, with 10% off pots and free delivery on orders over £90, a minimum saving of £38.50.  I wanted some more tulip pots, and while I won't need them until November when it is the right time to plant tulips, I thought I might as well get them cheap.  I can use them for bedding over the summer, which will be pretty, and it's not as though I'm going to get ten per cent on the money from the bank between now and then.  I was just beginning to worry that I hadn't had details of an offer this year, and wonder if they were going to do one, when the catalogue arrived.  I have said it before, but they are wonderful pots, and will last you a gardening lifetime, unless you drop them (or run them over in a truck, as happened to one of mine once).

It was still raining.  I arranged to meet up with various friends and relations, and trawled through my Amazon wish list.  I always keep a long list.  It acts as a reminder of things I've read about or heard on the radio that sound interesting, instead of keeping notes on scraps of paper which I invariably lose.  Sometimes they sit on there for years, and I go off the idea and delete them again.  Prices go up and down a lot, especially for second hand stuff.  There was a folk album I tracked for years, that always seemed to have three vendors on at £38.50, before a used copy described as very good popped up for a tenner.  I've gone off Amazon vendors for used books, after buying one too many that was grubbier and more battered than I would have expected from the description, but used CDs are generally fine.  After all, every CD I own counts as 'used', and unless they get scratched there isn't much to go wrong.  Or at least, we have been threatened with disc degradation and incompatibility with modern equipment, but it hasn't happened yet.

It is of course very quaint and old fashioned to still be buying CDs, and statistics show that the trend is against me.  I still like them.  Apart from a few that I have managed to scratch, every CD I have ever bought since they were first introduced still works, which is more than you can say for all the computers I've ever owned, most of which are completely dead.  And no, I don't expect Apple to go bust, and the chances of my music collection being lost in the cloud are probably about the same as those of my house burning down with my CDs in it.  But I like having information stored in discrete packages where if one gets damaged or lost the others are fine (eggs, baskets).  As I'm not great at managing technology I like having a disc that I can put in a slot just like putting vinyl on a turntable, without getting caught up in an episode of Computer says No.  I like the sleeve notes.  I actually like the thing-ness of the row of cases in the shelf.

It's still raining.  There's no more to be said.

planting tulips

Four large boxes arrived yesterday afternoon while I was out, which contained the pots from Whichford, so I spent a happy day unpacking them, and planting the tulip bulbs that have been sitting down in the garage for weeks.  I was relieved to see the pots arrive, given that I did want to get on with planting the tulips, and the pottery hadn't given me an ETA.  The Systems Administrator who was at home when they arrived said that they came by a commercial parcel company, not Whichford's own transport.

Terracotta flowerpots can't be the easiest things to send, though I assume the carrier they use knows not to drop the boxes if they want to keep the Whichford account.  The pots were stacked inside each other, padded with wood shavings, and bubble wrap secured snugly around the rims with parcel tape, tied into rigid bundles with plastic string, and surrounded by tightly packed straw.  None of them were broken.  In the spirit of reduce, recycle, reuse, the straw and wood shavings went into the chicken run as litter to soak up their droppings, and keep their feet dry if it ever rains.  The bubble wrap went in the plastics recycling bin and I'll take the boxes into work to use for our own mail order, so the only thing that went straight into the rubbish was the plastic string.  There was a tiny bit of newspaper involved too, which I'll use to line the vegetable peelings bin the next time I empty it, and I was amused to see that was from The Times.  I wouldn't expect the Daily Mirror, not from Whichford.  The boxes are currently dumped in the lower sitting room, where they are affording great amusement to the cats.  Let's hope none of our plant mail order customers have severe cat allergies.

I bought six pots decorated with basket weave for the tall tulips, which was fewer than I'll need but as many as I could afford at the time, and some shallow pans for the houseleeks that live on the low wall around the terrace (or patio.  Terrace sounds pretentious and patio sounds suburban so I'm not sure which it is).  Several of the current garden centre houseleek pots are disintegrating after last winter, and I would like to upgrade them all in time.  Some of last year's tulip pots haven't crumbled too badly yet, and will do for another year.  I got some reduced-to-clear peat free compost in B&Q, which I wouldn't risk for long term pot plantings of shrubs, but should do for bulbs that will be all finished come next May.  Or at least I hope it will.  The last bag I had wasn't bad, and the things I planted in it are alive and sprouting.

The peat issue is a tricky one.  While the Irish burn the stuff in power stations I feel that not using it in the garden must be a futile gesture, then I read about the beauties of peat bog vegetation, and the value of peat bogs in locking up carbon, and feel I shouldn't ethically use it, except maybe for seed compost where the volume really will be tiny, and the cost of failure (all those packets of seed and all that time spent sowing them) severe.  Just because other people do bad things isn't always an excuse to do them too.  If the tulips fail I will reconsider my high moral position.

I've gone for orange, red and purple again for the tulips, plus a few T. kaufmanniana that I've put in little clay pots for next spring, then will plant out into the border.  I considered going for soft pinks and creams as a change, but I like the strong colours. and they look well with the lime green flowers of Euphobia x characias which seeds itself around the Italian garden where the tulip pots stand.  T. kaufmanniana has cream coloured petals with a yellow base, and those bulbs will end up in the island bed in the back garden where I already have a couple of T. kaufmanniana varieties, I think 'Ancilla' which is pale lemon with a scarlet throat, and 'Heart's Delight' which is red and white.  Unlike the tall Darwin and Triumph hybrids, which mostly dwindle quickly in the ground, several of the small species tulips naturalise reasonably well, and I've had these two for years.

all's well in tulip time

The tulips are looking great.  If I were an oligarch I wouldn't bother buying a premier league football club, but I should like one of those gardens where every year 10,000 tulip bulbs were planted.  As it is I have a dozen pots of them.  I love tulips in all their manifestations, as bunches of flowers for the house, and Blom's magnificent display at Chelsea (the stress each year.  Will this be the first time in about 65 years that they don't get awarded a Gold Medal?), but tulips outdoors have an extra beauty because the sun can shine through their petals.  You can see where the petals overlap at the base of each flower by the arc of darker colour, sharply demarcated from the luminous area of single thickness of petal above.  Viewed close up the petals glisten and have a striated surface texture like polished steel.

I went for bright colours again this year.  The soft pinks and whites are pretty, but the hot reds and oranges are more exciting.  First to open was 'Red Impression', a classic goblet shaped tulip in bright red, with a black blotch at the base of each petal.  These are still looking good, but starting to lean and weave in different directions.  It is a Darwin hybrid.  I tried to pick varieties that would open over a period, to give me a longer season, and it should in theory have been behind the Triumph tulips, as the Triumphs are supposed to open mid to late April and the Darwins late April to mid May, but never mind.  Triumph tulips are also the traditional tulip shape, and I went for 'Orange Sun', 'Abu Hassan', 'Jan Reus' and 'Negrita'.  'Orange Sun' is very much at the red end of the orange spectrum, with a silvery reverse to the petals, and the effect is warm and soft and not at all glaring.  'Abu Hassan' is a deep brownish-purple, with yellow edges and bases to the petals.  'Jan Reus' is a lovely deep burgundy, and again the backs of the petals have a hint of silver.  'Negrita' is a rich mid-purple.

Last to open are the Lily Flowered tulips, with their elegant pointed petals.  The first flower has just opened in one pot of 'Ballerina', which is a warm apricot, lifted by the yellow stamens and basal blotch.  The other Lily Flowered variety is 'Red Shine', and that hasn't opened at all yet.

I got them all from Peter Nyssen, a whosesaler which has also sold to members of the public for many years.  Christopher Lloyd repeatedly recommended the firm in his books, which is where I picked up the name.  The minimum quantity you can buy of one tulip variety is 25 bulbs, which does two 33cm pots nicely.  The cheapest ones were £16 per hundred bulbs last season, which equates to £4 per 25 and £2 per pot.  Buying tulips in packets from garden centres, or from the wonderful Bloms, it is easy to pay 45-50p per bulb, which comes to over £5 per pot.  In the old City days it was a great game to go around the Bloms stand with an order form, ticking the boxes against the names of the ones I liked, and then forgetting about it until autumn when a large box of tulip bulbs arrived, together with the bill.  Nowadays I make sure I choose Peter Nyssen's cheapest varieties, many of which are very good, just not the newest and trendiest.  It's tough on Bloms, as I still look at their lovely Chelsea exhibit, and Peter Nyssen doesn't do one of those.

The tulips were potted last November in ordinary multi-purpose compost, and stood outside all through the winter weather.  Unlike the potted hyacinths, they are absolutely fine.  That is more than can be said for the pots.  I used to use traditional clay pots, around the 33cm size, and got fed up with them blowing over, so a couple of years ago I bought some broader based, shorter ones from B&Q.  They are 33cm at the top, but only 25cm across the base and 25cm tall.  The proportions look very nice, in fact, and they give adequate rooting depth for tulips  Unfortunately they were not sufficiently weather proof.  None of them have cracked, but the rims are flaking off.  I think I need to plan ahead, and buy a set of plain pots for bulbs from Whichford Pottery, if they have a winter sale as usual, except that that will be after the point when I should have planted the bulbs.

In the gravel, dwarf tulips are bringing the miniature bulbs season to its conclusion.  These are reasonably persistent, at least in our free draining gravel.  They are all so pretty, I tend to choose them as well on the basis of going for the species and varieties where I can afford to get 25 rather than 3.

Addendum  I wrote that Geranium maculatum 'Chatto' had flowers in a dreamy shade of pale blue, which is how I remembered them.  Then I found the label on the kitchen table, and it said that the flowers were pink, so I went outside and had a look at them.  I'm not sure whether they should be called pink or blue.  They are a pale lavender with veining, which in some lights is definitely pink, but in others a soft blue in the way that blue clematis almost always have some pink in them.  It just goes to show that you should have the plant in front of you while writing about it.  I couldn't be bothered to set up an extension cable so that I could sit in front of the tulips to blog about them (laptop battery life nowadays approx 3 minutes) but I did go out (with a clipboard) and take notes before sitting down to write.