Spring promise

Wednesday, 18th November 2009

Last autumn, I issued a self-denying ordinance.

Last autumn, I issued a self-denying ordinance. I would not allow myself to plant a single solitary tulip in the garden, except in the large terrace pots. This was because the varieties planted in the open ground had become hopelessly muddled over time, so I wanted to clear the borders of them. We are often told that bulbs are envelopes of secret spring promise buried in autumn, or some such thing; however, the adamantine imperative of a spring-flowering bulb’s requirement for a period of dormancy in summer means you cannot, to save your life, find them in July or August, when you need to dig them up. (The old advice to remove tulips soon after flowering, when you could still find them, and bury them elsewhere, for replanting in the borders in autumn, always seemed to me doomed to failure; you can hardly expect a bulb to plump up and initiate buds ready to flower the following year, if it has had its roots torn out of the ground at just that moment when it needs them most.)

Highly bred tulips have a tendency either to fade away entirely or come up the following year in stunted and ragged fashion, so that the effect is decidedly bedraggled and unaesthetic. The artful disposition of tulips in a garden is often problematic, anyway, since it can be difficult to make ramrod-straight flowering stems look at home in a lax setting, but it becomes downright impossible if the tulips that do survive to flower again are so random in their colours.

Thanks to my restraint last year, I could sit down calmly this summer and order as many tulips as I liked, to accompany home-raised wallflowers, sweet Williams or forget-me-nots in the borders. That may sound hopelessly old-fashioned to you, but there is an ebullient gaiety about spring ‘bedding’, which I can never entirely resist. And May can be a dull old month in a limey garden like mine, where rhododendrons and azaleas will not grow. I don’t let tulips take over whole borders, simply wend a colourful path through permanent plantings of herbaceous perennials (mostly still only low green foliage in May) and leafing-up shrubs and roses. Each year, these bulbs allow me the fun of playing around with different colour combinations. It is a rule of life that, however many bulbs you order, there are never ever nearly enough. So, like a canny general, I have learnt to concentrate my forces in areas where they can make most impact. Since highly bred tulips bear little resemblance to those in the wild, there is no possibility of treating them ‘naturalistically’, in any event, so I don’t even try.

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