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.
Anyone who wants answers as to how to grow bulbs successfully and satisfactorily in the garden — and not only the show-stoppers like tulips, daffodils and lilies, but also intriguing or enchanting minor genera, such as Tritelia, Arisaema, Bellevalia and Bulbocodium — can do much worse than to buy a copy of Bulb. This is Anna Pavord’s new book on, well, bulbs, published by Mitchell Beazley (£30). Although the lack of the definite article in the title is strangely irritating (surely the result of a misguided ‘great idea’ from Geoff in Marketing?), this is a handsomely produced book, with cloth-bound spine, heavy board covers, high-quality paper, ribbon page-marker, and text typeset in Fairfield — all of which proclaim it as a book of substance, and one destined for a long life on public and private library shelves. This impression is underlined by the luminous clarity of the photographic images, to be found on every page. They are almost all the work of Andrew Lawson, with the assistance of the delightfully named Torie Chugg.
I must declare a connection here: both writer and principal photographer are good friends of mine so, if you think my view is inevitably compromised by friendship, you need take no notice of what I say. But I should be surprised if the most disengaged observer were not impressed by the high quality of this collaborative effort between author, photographers and publisher.
Anna Pavord’s strengths as a writer on garden bulbs lie partly in a most readable and individual writing style, and partly in her experience of both growing many kinds of bulb and seeing a fair few of them in the wild. And she has the humility to seek answers of experts when her own experience doesn’t provide them. The text which complements the beautiful, yet compellingly truthful, photographs is a rich mix of close-observation notes, historical background and practical advice on how to make bulbs flourish in your garden and why they sometimes don’t. Her best advice is the simplest: that no garden can have too many bulbs. Quite so.
Back to the Garden, Ursula Buchan’s third anthology of garden writing, which contains many articles first seen in The Spectator, is published by Frances Lincoln, price £16.99.
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