I have been influenced. I suppose we’re all constantly in a state of being inspired or stimulated by factors external to ourselves, whether its the weather, the opinion of our friends, or something we’ve read about in a book – these things, and our responses to them, are ways in which we know we’re alive. But I have been influenced with a capital I and done something I wouldn’t otherwise have done (probably), bought something when I wouldn’t have done it (certainly), and I’m worried it might have made me a different kind of gardener (unlikely). Horrifyingly, a gardener who does things in both a timely and organised fashion. This is striking at the very underpinnings of my identity.
Anyway, I’d forgotten all about this until I got home from my Friday garden on a Thursday to find waiting for me a bloody great box overflowing with daffodil bulbs. I don’t ever remember buying daffodil bulbs in such number before, and certainly not in September, when you’re supposed to buy them, right in time for October, when you’re supposed to plant them. I’m habitually a confirmed late bulber, scoffing at every one else as they panic to secure the latest, most talked about varieties (Tulip ‘La Belle Époque’, Dahlia ‘Café au Lait’ – anything that manages to exhibit that strange floral combination of being at once flouncy and beigey, while sounding a bit French), and swooping in at the last moment to buy things at a knock down price, before sticking everything in the ground sometime in the weeks immediately after Christmas. That’s how I usually go about the business of planting spring flowering bulbs. A last minute merchant, and proud of it. Quite late for the daffs and alliums, just about right for the tulips. The concept of planting bulbs when the leaves haven’t even begun to fall from the trees is, to me, mind boggling.
And so this box of bulbs is sitting on the kitchen worktop, getting in the way, or it was until I hauled it into the garden on the last day of summer, and set upon sticking its contents in the ground. And it was at this point that I realised why I don’t plant bulbs this early in the year.
Had I been planting in the flowerbeds, I probably wouldn’t have noticed a thing. It’s been quite dry for the past few weeks, and the soil isn’t at its most yielding, but it hardly requires an effort to sink a trowel into it. But the daffs were destined for the lawn, and that’s quite a different matter. You don’t make a habit of digging lawns over, or covering them in inches of mulch to encourage the wildlife to wriggle about and keep them fluffy. Raking and aerating them once a year, perhaps, if you’re really into lawny stuff, and I’m not which, incidentally, is almost certainly why there’s more ribwort plantain, self-heal and clover in our lawn than there is yer actual grass. And so the lawn, for which the daffs were destined, was as hard as rock.
Bone-shudderingly, trowel-bendingly hard.
To the extent that planting what was (in spite of my whingeing) only about a hundred bulbs, something that shouldn’t have taken more than an hour’s pleasant furtling took almost three times as long, completely mashed the bulb planter while nicely tenderising the fleshy part of my right palm (which, it turns out, is the most useful ground-breaking tool when paired with a thin and pointy copper trowel).
Still, the daffs are in the ground – probably the most un-daff-like narcissi you could think of, if I’m honest. Three white varieties, Pheasant’s Eye (Narcissus poeticus), Polar Ice and the double-flowered Obdam, none of which I’ve grown in this garden before. To add insult to injury, an hour or so after I stopped the heavens opened and it poured with rain, though whether much of it sunk into the lawn to soften the ground I’m not entirely convinced. At least the daffs have had their first watering.
But now the solstice is here and, with it, the autumn, and I’m in the very unfamiliar situation of already having made a start on my bulb planting. I’m consoling myself that it was too uncomfortable an experience to be repeated – a blip, an anomaly, an aberration – an exception to the well established rule of not even thinking about buying a bulb until people are carving their pumpkins for Hallowe’en. Disorder will be restored with immediate effect. I’ve tried the alternative, and it didn’t suit.
This makes me feel much better about my perpetually late bulb planting habits! Why buy them now when they’ll be in the sale later? They’ll still all flower in spring! But then again I always regret it in December when I’m running out of time and it’s absolutely freezing. You might feel more smug about those daffs when it’s coming up to Christmas?
Love this, thanks so much Andrew