Bulbs and bare roots

Bramble & Briar #66

On Tuesday, while America was deciding its fate (and, by extension, ours), I was buying bulbs. I like to think I did a good job.

Anyone can buy bulbs, of course. The tricky bit, as you’ll know if you’ve done it before, is not so much in the buying, as the choosing. Now, it’s very true that even the most haphazard selection of flowers, bursting upwards from the ground in spring having spent much of the past year huddled tightly inside their perennating storage organs (no wonder they just use the word ‘bulb’ in the catalogues) would bring a measure of cheer to the garden, sufficient to gladden the coldest of hearts after a dark and dingy winter. But if you’re after a slightly more considered approach than the random equivalent of a floral riot – and frankly, of all the things I’m after in the garden, that’s, well... one of them – then you want to give the matter a little thought. Or at least to outsource the thought to someone who’s done it for you – a carefully considered collection of colours and forms and heights and flowering times (these are the main variables to consider when you’re buying tulips, as I was), available as a collection with a fancy name. Quite a sensible place to start. But, stubborn as I am, I prefer to do the choosing myself, even if the results aren’t quite so guaranteed – at least they’re my mistakes. Usually. The biggest tulip error we’ve had here is when I ordered a job lot of the very elegant White Triumphator, and received something entirely different. It’s hard to tell from looking at a brown lumpy thing what the contents might contain, so it wasn’t until the following spring that the mistake was realised and by then, it was too late to do anything about it. Instead of the sophisticated, lily-flowered forms of White Triumphator, a very silly tulip sprung up from the ground. Tall, well-built white goblets, at least early in the morning when the beds were in the shade. The moment the sun appeared, the flowers unburdened themselves of any pretence at decorum and threw their petals open absurdly wide, revealing a yellow centre and leaving absolutely no floral part to the imagination. Not at all what I had intended, but precisely, I came to realise, what we needed. A tulip as silly as we are. Which only goes to show, as the philosopher Jagger once wrote, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

Purissima, by the way. The silly tulip. A floosyish spaniel of a flower. And did I say long-lived? I did not, but I should have done. Reliably perennial, if you’re being po-faced and horticultural about it, but the effect is identical, the daft, wrong tulips I planted over 15 years ago (can’t quite remember when, but I’m thinking perhaps the winter of 2007), only last year suggesting that they might finally be looking to retire.

Hmmm. That went on a bit. Suffice to say, that was our main tulip mistake. Others have come and gone, but Purissima has stayed, as have (eventually) White Triumphator, and Queen of Night. Two whites, and a deep purple black. This year, I’m mostly renewing these stalwarts, while adding Jackpot, whose dark purple petals with a white band across the top pay homage to all the above. The oranges – mostly Brownie, Ballerina and Brown Sugar (Rolling Stones again), with some Appledoorn Elite and Cairo in a pot – can fend for themselves this year. Like Purissima, our stock of the violet Double Negrita have been dwindling, so reserves have been called for, along with a trial run of two new (to me) varieties, Flaming Purissima (which sounds like a nasty medical condition, I’d advise cranberry juice) and the diminutive hageri ‘Little Beauty’, which will work nicely in a small terracotta pot, where it can pretend to be the reticulate irises I left it too late to buy (haven’t scoured the garden centres yet, will have to be quick because they’ve filling up with tinsel as I write).

We gardeners get terribly excited about bulbs towards the end of the year. Admittedly, it hits most people much earlier than it gets me, and I had that very out of character daffodil planting incident back in September – but as darkness falls, the impulse to furtively dash out under the cover of twilight and lay a minefield of hope across the garden is hard to deny. And just as we think we might have got over this, someone is bound to remind us that bare root roses are now being sent out.

I was very excited to get an email from David Austin telling me that they had 15% off their bare root roses until the end of the year (use the code PLANTNOW online – not an ad, just a heads up). It’s particularly welcome as the price of roses shot up last year, though, if you’re putting a price on perennial joy, you’d still be pushed to find a better investment. According to habit, I had not gotten around to putting in my order, but had cause to be quite pleased about my talent for dithering when an email arrived telling me that I’d ordered the very rose I was thinking of buying back in September. Silly sod. Actually, I had an excuse – I’d been after ‘Julia’s rose’ all year, but everywhere sold out months ago, and I had responded to a restocking email with the speed I considered necessary for such an in-demand variety. Still, according to my terrible maths, this all means I can buy yet another rose, only this time using the discount, which might leave me a few quid down in the piggy bank but several rungs higher on the ladder of delight.

The very excellent Jo Thompson advised in a recent post over on The Gardening Mind that you should heel your bare root roses in as soon as they arrive, even if you’re just bunging them in the ground with soil over their roots in a holding position, waiting for a more convenient moment to plant them with due ceremony in their allotted spot. This is, by far, the best practice, though I have to confess to keeping at least one of my previous purchases alive for several months by sticking it in a full watering can over winter. There are, someone once said, only two classes: first class, and no class. I’ll leave you to guess which is Jo, and which is me.

Bare root roses, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of sticks. Get those roots in the ground – anywhere – as soon as they arrive. Or, you know… stick them in a full watering can all winter if you’re more of a chancer

And still our days grow shorter – more than a month left of this encroaching gloom – and all we can do is wrap up, get outside, and fill our eyes with the fading light. And what better excuse could be found for doing that, than playing with bulbs and bare roots?

Just a reminder that the latest episode of my Gardens, Weeds & Words podcast is out, so check your podcast catchers, or listen online here