The spring collection

The ground is in an excellent state for planting bulbs. So often recent autumns have baked it hard and made the business of digging in daffodils a torture. I am not economising, as the process ought to be fun both in execution and subsequent contemplation.

I long to ask woolly minded eco-gardeners how they reconcile flowering bulbs with their meretricious idea of the garden as a “haven for wildlife.” The wilder shores of wildlife massacre tulips and crocuses as soon as they are planted. Those bossy guides to “sustainability” show pictures of airbrushed hedgehogs and vanishing red squirrels without so much as a word about the side effects of grey squirrels among crocuses or badgers in a bed of Darwin tulips. I long to give the lot of them a short sharp shock and send them off to loot the open country where they belong.

Meanwhile I have adapted to their vandalism with some success. Drifts of lovely chrysanthus crocuses are out of the question within reach of a badger’s snout by night, but the smaller corms of the tommasinianus varieties are relatively safe. I have built up colonies of the deep purple Ruby Giant during years of maximum badger mania. Even if they finally savage the flowering tips, the corms will survive for a future year and then flower very freely.

Last March I lost my resident old badger boar to a wild night’s clubbing with a young male interloper and a wily old fox. All three fell into my swimming pool and drowned on a high night out. The tommasinianus crocuses were not yet in bud and have never been so good as in the aftermath of this show of animal spirits. The bigger-flowered Dutch varieties had already been ravaged. Their big corms are so desirable that they are ploughed up by badgers within days of being planted. Any survivors are then excavated by grey squirrels.

Darwin tulip

Wildlife, mercifully, leaves narcissi well alone. Daffodil leaves are said to be poisonous to cattle and certainly a big narcissus corm is too much for a squirrel to cart away. I have invested heavily in smaller narcissi to combat what fantasists call the “privilege” of sharing the garden with deer and rabbits. They are the answer to the menace but they tend to give the spring too much of a yellow shine.

I choose three categories, the essential backbone to a spring garden with stamina. I start the year with two superb varieties, so early into flower that they lift the spirits when they appear in late January. One is sometimes sold as January Gold but its proper name is Rijnveld’s Early Sensation. It is fully hardy but it opens its mid-yellow trumpet-shaped flowers on stems about a foot high even before many snowdrops are out. It is brilliant value but Narcissus Spring Dawn may be even better. It is also short-stemmed but its flowers are a paler colour, nearer to primrose-white. Spring Dawn is now in the general wholesale trade, so we can expect to see ever more of it in gardens. These two fine daffodils are the first true hint of spring even before any crocuses are visible. A sharp frost may cause the flower stems to fall out flatly but they always pick up and stand straight again. I think that every keen gardener should have both these varieties. Last winter after the heavy snow they flowered excellently but not until early February.

My daffodil season then moves on to the short-stemmed varieties with which I outwit squirrels and hares. I use them in lawns instead of vulnerable Dutch crocuses and have learnt to like the bright rivers of early yellow flowers. Maybe the double-headed yellow Tête à Tête is the best of all but I also put February Gold and Jack Snipe in the same class. They have the vigour to cope with lawn turf year after year especially if you add a pinch of general garden Growmore under each bulb when you first trowel them in. Another dusting with Growmore is a good idea in early March when the flowers fade. The reason why some daffodils dwindle in turf is that they are not fertilized sufficiently in competition with all the grass.

Narcissus Actaea

By late March, in normal years, the limelight moves to the traditional bigger-flowered varieties. For years I have been rewarded by the multi-headed double flowered Narcissus Sir Winston Churchill, a specially strong performer which I first identified years ago in Germany. The colour is creamy yellow with a darker middle and the flowers lasted well even in this year’s absurdly sunny spring. I have recently fallen for Narcissus Red Hill which has a clear white outer surround and a good red cup. It is a curtain–raiser for the “pheasant eye” varieties which often wait until May in normal seasons. Narcissus Actaea is cheaper than the true old Pheasant Eye and also very well scented. No rabbit bothers with it.

In grass I have had success with two very different tulips. Under lime trees Tulip praestans Fusilier has built up now into an enchanting colony, accompanying the blue-flowered Anemone blanda. I strongly recommend this combination but mine is so good because it is in a college where the traffic of visitors and nocturnal students deters wildlife from raids on the bulbs. Fusilier has lived in grass for more than 15 years now and shows up splendidly against fresh spring turf. Its vivid scarlet red is the perfect match for a green background.

Anemone blanda

Photographers beguile us with pictures of naturalised lily-flowered tulips in grass, but they never return to show how few survive for as long as three years. The better bet is another vivid red, an antidote to too much green in the garden in mid May. Tulip Apeldoorn is now the most widely available red with the strength to survive in long grass but Oxford is every bit as good. I have watched both of them return year after year in rough grass beside my daily road to work.

Lastly, a tip which seems to work when planting bags of pretty anemones. The blue forms of Anemone blanda are my favourites, just ahead of the lovely pinks and whites, but the problem is how best to plant the knobbly hard little corms. First, soak them all in a bowl of cold water overnight. Then, simply scatter them onto the surface of well-raked earth and cover them over with a light dressing of soil. Last year I planted several hundred without any painful trowelling under trees. Even after the savage winter most of them came up and flowered. The expectation is that the corms will then settle down to the depth which is adequate for them in future. I wait in hope to see the results but will be repeating the experiment again this year. These anemones are still very cheap. Even if fewer of them persist it is so satisfying to throw down the one sort of munch which a pet squirrel will not touch. The corms of these anemones are hard enough to break a tooth. I have even seen a squirrel spit them out and scamper off.