Tulips in the garden

This is a surprise. I decided to pare back on my annual tulip ordering last year. But there is colour all over the garden.

Andrew Wilkie very kindly lets me order from his catalogues of Dutch bulb suppliers.  That means I benefit from a huge discount and the chance to give this garden a splash of colour at the right time of year.

In the beginning I went tulip mad.  After all, that’s where I thought I would get my glam.  And the narcissus, the daffodils, were a sensible addition.

You see endless glorious shots of tulips in other gardens at this time of year. Who knew they were such a fleeting sensation?

Over the years I have learned my lesson.  Tulips are almost an annual plant.  They get planted in November, come up and flower in spring. And then… nothing.

The poor plants are exhausted from throwing up such a spike of colour and I rarely get repeats. Well, some purissima will come back. And a few others around the potting shed where I plant out the bulbs after they have flowered.

But I don’t water them carefully after they have been planted out, so the stems are usually much shorter in their second and third years.

And I just can’t rely on any repeat flowering en masse, which is what I want.

And the allium purple sensations are the same.  The only repeating alliums are a few christophiis right on the edge of the east garden.

So I have come to realise that daffs are the way to go. If you plant them deep enough and away from the voracious mole rats, they come back every spring and are as reliable as can be.  Deer don’t eat them which is a result in a rural garden.

And you can get a similar effect from narcissus Thalia (the white daff) where you really might have wanted to get tulip Mt Tacoma in among the box balls under the wisteria in the east garden.

So I’m planning to go daff mad this autumn.

Typical gardener. It’s not even spring and I’m already thinking about what I will plant six months from now. I ought to stand back and admire what I have now, rather than thinking ahead.