Spring bulbs – are they worth it?

Are you finding your inbox is full of all sorts of spring bulb offers at the moment? Dazzling dwarf daffs, bags of crocus corms for a fiver, mix n’ match tulips, all that sort of thing?

There are several spring bulbs that don’t cut the mustard – with 3Growbags at any rate – though as usual we are not all in agreement………

I’ve decided that folk who have a garden full of tulips through April and May must have deep pockets.  I don’t want you to misunderstand me, I am as much of a sucker for gaudy tulips of all kinds from Flaming Parrots, to ‘waterlily’ blooms the size of soup-bowls. Laura has been known to shudder as she peruses my flamboyant pots in spring. And there is very little in the garden, especially at that time of year, with such glorious saturated colour and presence.  

BUT very few of them last much more than a year.  A few might struggle on for a year or two before petering out, but the vast majority finish their flowering and disappear underground never to be seen again.  So if you can’t live without the rainbow explosion that tulips give you, you’ll have to replace them the following autumn.

My best advice is to do your homework – there ARE tulip varieties that are reliably perennial, and these are mostly species tulips: T. kaufmannia, greigii, tarda, praestans, etc. Arundel Castle Gardens have had great success with T. ‘Apeldoorn’ on their steep grassy banks.  The Darwin Hybrids are supposed to be good repeaters.   If you’re addicted to the jazzier ones, you’ll just have to loosen your purse strings each autumn…

My beef with alliums is more complicated.  A lot are fab – gorgeous colours, pleasing form, well-behaved given the right spot. A. christophii has been a favourite for many years with its big silver-mauve flowers shining in the spring borders – it’s a cracker for winter decorations in the house too.  

But in my experience you need to be very careful with some of the smaller alliums offered for sale – A. ursinum, triquetrum, vineale or roseum will romp through your flower beds and take over.  They’ll survive the compost heap too.  Buy with your eyes wide open or regret it forever!

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Yes, it’s very tempting when the bulb sellers slash their prices to shift their stock before they shrivel up completely, and none of us are immune to these seeming bargains.

It would need to be a humungous discount to lure me into buying any of Elaine’s mutant flouncy tulips, but show me an image of an Oxford College water meadow awash with snakes head fritillaries and I’m reaching for the ‘Add to Basket’ button.

But it seems that you probably need an Oxfordshire meadow ‘with deep fertile soil and cool moist summers’ to keep these fickle little bulbs happy. Several years running I have spent a couple of futile hours in the autumn which I’ll never get back, trying to fool Fritillaria meleagris that my drought-ridden wildflower meadow 0n the edge of an HGV repair yard is a good substitute for those picturesque water meadows beside the dreaming spires of Magdalen college.

Conversely it’s a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’ if you succumb to the lure of a load of cut price grape hyacinth (Muscari). You’ll be delighted with them the first spring, especially as they are good doers even in light shade. But from then on it’s a battlefield as you try to stem their advance across your spring borders as they have both seed dispersal and bulb multiplication in their arsenal. As you can see from our feature picture at the top of this week’s blog, the flowers are followed by mountains of fleshy leaves. If you insist on growing them, choose a small handful of the more unusual ones and confine them to a pot.

One final cautionary note: DO NOT to waste a single penny of your bulb budget on freesias. ‘Prepared’ or not these finicky South Africans are so random in their flowering tendencies and simply never flower a second time round that a far better use of your time and money is to simply buy a bunch of flowering stems from the florist when you want them.

OK so my sisters have been tinkering around the edges, picking off soft targets on the grounds of  family budget (tulips) or over-achievement (muscari) etc.  Stand aside while I think what you might think unthinkable…

Daffodils – do you need them? Definitely not if you live north and or west of Manchester (neither of my sisters). The optimism of their stout little shoots in March is snuffed out by April gales with exasperating regularity. For me, flattened daffodil blooms pile on the ‘when will winter end?’ gloom when you least need it. Add to that the tiresome need to mow around their floppy foliage until late May and you realise that anything other than the squat ‘tete-a-tete’ or ‘jetfire’ daffs are just not worth it.

Crocus – see above but this time it’s their wine glass structure (not normally an issue for me) that causes problems. I’m no good at physics but how is a tiny stem beneath a thumping great flower head ever going to be a goer in what I consider a proper UK climate (eight months of gales, ice and snow). It’s a ‘no’ for most parts of our Scottish Highlands.

Iris Reticulata – See above and above. I’m sort of fascinated to see them struggling through with their intricate colouring and elfin structure but I’m afraid they’re a ballerina tottering into the bullring up here. Your investment, earnest planting and priceless expectation may earn you just a single day of reward before they inevitably crumple – and most of that day is likely to be spent trying to find them such is their fragility. 

I know what you’re thinking – that we’ve got it in for spring bulbs – so, for balance, here we’ve each chosen our fave three:

ELAINE: Allium christophii

Narcissus ‘Cheerfulness’

English bluebells

LAURA:

Crocus tommasinianus

Fritillaria raddeana

Iris tuberosa

CAROLINE:

Galanthus (snowdrops)

Chionodoxa (Glory of the Snow)

Anemone blanda

We’d love to know how you feel about spring bulbs – are there some to which you would no longer give house-room?

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Louise has chosen a wonderful grass this week as one of her Great Plants this Month. Perfect for a smaller garden, and it doesn’t even need full sun to show off its beautiful flower-plumes:

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Is your garden winter-ready?

Leaves, leaves everywhere! This fabulous hand rake allows you to get right under your plants and leave your borders looking great right through the winter.

Are you prepped to help your plants through the snow and ice? These frost jackets can be the difference between life and the compost heap for your babies!