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.

tempted by catalogues

The new year brings spring catalogues from Broadleigh Gardens and Avon Bulbs.  I see that this year will be the last that Broadleigh exhibit at Chelsea, as owner Lady Skelmersdale has decided that 40 Chelsea exhibits will be enough.  I have been to every Chelsea since the mid 1980s.  If I were to go down to the garage and check my boxes of old RHS magazines I suppose I could work out the exact year I started, but I think I narrowly pip the Systems Administrator's record of continuous attendance at every Cheltenham race meeting since 1987.  That means I've seen over 25 of Broadleigh's stands.  They have always been wonderful, and I shall miss them.  I can still remember Beth Chatto's exhibits, skilful displays of naturalistic planting, and she packed in Chelsea a good few years ago.  Still, I suppose somebody has to retire to make room for new blood.

The agapanthus are tempting.  Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus.  She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size.  When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away.  It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.

The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well.  This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds.  If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots.  No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.

Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.)  It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen.  I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier.  One looks a bit lonely.  Stingy, even.  Maybe I should have several.  The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden  impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several.  Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).

I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops.  They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen.  But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden.  And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them.  Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours.  I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.

Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless.  £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'.  I think not.  They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower.  That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer.  I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring.  The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging.  I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year.  Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then.  The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second.  At least I have a greenhouse.  Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.

snowdrops

The snowdrops are well above ground now, still in tight bud but I can see the glint of white.  I love snowdrops and have planted a lot over the years, mostly the common sort Galanthus nivalis.  That is partly because this is a large and wild garden in which tiny treasures get lost, and I couldn't afford to plant the unusual named varieties in the quantities that would be required to make an impact.  However, it's mainly that I like the common ones.  Their size and scale look right here, and I don't get that excited by a green spot more or less.

A great deal gets said and written about the right time to plant or move snowdrops.  Planting in the green is recommended, when they are in active growth, which means they are offered for sale from now until the end of February as freshly dug bulbs, but some experts say that it stresses the plants to damage their roots at this time, and that the ideal time to disturb them would be in late August when they were first starting into growth.  The obvious practical difficulty with moving them then is that nothing remains above ground to tell you where on earth they are, or what other bulbous treasures might be lurking below.  At least in February you can see clearly what is going on.  Lady Skelmersdale, owner of the excellent specialist small bulb supplier Broadleigh Bulbs explained in an RHS lecture she gave at Writtle College a few years ago why buying bags of dried out snowdrop bulbs in autumn is not a good idea.  They hate drying out, she said, and by the time you buy them they may already be dead.

I have planted snowdrops in the lower part of the garden, and, after some soul searching, in the wood.  The wood though very small is presumed ancient, and contains a mixture of ground flora characteristic of wet alder woodland, including opposite leaved golden saxifrage.  Snowdrops, which were probably introduced to the UK and are so are not part of the native flora, don't form part of that natural mix.  But they are not too competitive and won't hybridise with any of the existing wild plants.  I would never plant Spanish bluebells anywhere in the garden given that the British sort grow in the wood.  The aesthetic desire for a snowdrop woodland walk won out.  It is interesting watching how bulbs grow in there.  The bluebells make dense stands in some places and don't grow at all in others, presumably reflecting local variations in moisture or soil or some aspect of the conditions.  The snowdrops are similarly picky, so I plant thinly into new areas, and then the following season bulk up the planting in the bits where I can see they are doing well.  My contibution to the great debate over when to plant them is to advise that if you are planting them in an area where you already have some snowdrops then leave planting more until the display from the existing ones is going over.  The newly planted ones tend to flop and start dying down prematurely, which detracts from the overall appearance, if the established ones haven't finished flowering.  Once they have started to flop too it doesn't make any difference.

In the interests of fairness, having mentioned Broadleigh I should also mention Avon Bulbs, my other favourite supplier of top quality small bulbs.  They are not the cheapest, but their plants are very good and they list some interesting and unusual things.  For common snowdrops I don't use either of them, but one of the bulk suppliers who advertise in the backs of the gardening magazines.