What’s new, what’s growing and what’s going on this month
NEWS COMPILED BY MOLLY BLAIR
ARTFLOWERING TALENT
The eagle-eyed among you may recognise the name Rosanna Morris from these pages.
Rosanna (not to be confused with our new back-page illustrator) has long been one of our regular writers, but she’s now swapped her pen for a paintbrush to capture the essence of some of her favourite garden plants, from the simplicity of snowdrops to the luxuriance of irises and double tulips. “I love the diverse beauty of the flower,” she says, “and I aim to capture the textures and colours, the speckles and stripes.” Rosanna’s love of painting dates back to childhood when her great-aunt Rose, an accomplished artist, gave her a set of watercolour paints, but she has only recently rediscovered her passion. Her small gouache paintings are already attracting plenty of attention, and have earned her a recent commission from the chic Provençal hotel, Domaine de Chalamon. See more of her work at rosanna-morris.co.uk
Talking pointSHOULD WE BUY ORGANIC BULBS?
Many of us are coming round to the idea of gardening organically, especially when it comes to growing our own food, but even in an ornamental garden it makes sense to garden in as natural a way as possible, without the use of synthetic pesticides or fertilisers, using home-made compost, manure and other organic matter to feed your soil. But to garden organically, do we also need to ensure the seeds and bulbs we plant are produced organically?
Adam Hunt (above), who along with Lulu Urquhart runs both design studio Urquhart & Hunt and bulb supplier Organic Bulbs, thinks so. Bulbs and seeds are often produced on a mass scale, where pesticides and fertilisers have been used, so with non-organic bulbs you may well be importing the chemicals you’ve gone to great lengths to keep out of your garden. “There are a lot of benefits to bulbs that are grown organically,” says Adam, “both in terms of the people farming them, of the environment itself and then surprisingly in terms of the insects that feed on the bulbs once they are flowering.”
This, he says, is especially true for early pollinators. “When they are weak from hibernating all winter, the first meal of nectar that an insect will ingest is from a bulb. That first hit, when it is laden with fungicide and toxins, can seriously damage these emerging insects and could even be fatal. This is why it is so important to consider what we are planting as a food source for our essential
