Planting tubs of BRIGHT BULBS and dreaming of spring blossom is occupying Fiona Cumberpatch this month in her small town garden in Lincolnshire
On a grey day in November, you’ll most likely find me at the bottom of the garden, surrounded by mysterious-looking brown paper bags and tubs of potting compost. Yup, it’s bulb-planting time again! There is no better way to combat the shortening days and gloomy winter nights than prepping for a big blast of gorgeous spring colour.
I’ve been hoarding since September, buying bulbs from the supermarket, my local nursery and online from farmergracy.co.uk with a shopping list of daffs, muscari, irises, plus lots and lots of tulips. Bulbs must be the easiest and most purse-friendly way to achieve a colour surge. The trick is to go large for
maximum impact. For my main display, I pack a large old zinc bath tub – it’s over a metre long – with a blaze of gemstone-toned tulips. I’ll mix orange and pink flushed ‘Prinses Irene’ with the dramatic purple fringed petals of ‘Black Parrot’ and some slender toasted-peach ‘Ballerina’.
Peat-free compost and a couple of handfuls of horticultural grit go into the tub, filling it just under three-quarters of the way to the top. I place the bulbs close together, making sure that I mingle the different colours and shapes. Then it’s just a matter of pushing the bulbs into the compost with the pointed side up. I position them close together, only 2-3cm apart but never touching, to ensure a crammed-full effect. Some more compost is tipped on top and gently pressed down, and that’s it!
By January, I will see green shoots starting to nose through and, come April, I’ll have a fiery feature in the middle of my garden.
Last year, despite careful planning, there were a few surprises. Mail-order bulb suppliers are not always 100% accurate with their packing, and pick-and-mix bulb garden centre displays easily become muddled, so I did have a few rogue flowers, most noticeably the crazy-shaped red flaming petals of
