Gardeners, even temporary ones, should always look ahead. Do not narrow your thinking to the present or buy only what is in flower. Think now of summer and autumn and plan accordingly. Anticipation is part of the art, one which has never been more welcome. On April 19 it will be the 200th anniversary of the death in Greece of that genius of a poet, Lord Byron: he certainly nailed this English spring. While in sunny Venice seven years earlier, he penned a witty tribute in verse to England with all its faults. “I like the weather when it is not rainy, /That is, I like two months of every year”.
After the recent wet, think ahead about brightening summer and making the most of what may yet be a sunny autumn. For both purposes, gardens need a quick fix. The best way of administering one is to plant summer and autumn-flowering bulbs, choices which are not widely exploited in Britain although they are very hard to kill. All you need is a bag or two of bulbs with maybe 25 of each variety you have chosen, a trowel and a spare hour to do the job.
It seems counterintuitive to beginners. Surely we plant bulbs in autumn? Actually, summer and autumn bulbs go in now, a job I much enjoy. They are reinforcements for gardens soaked by months of rain, but they also succeed very well in hotter holiday gardens, closer to the climate they enjoy in the wild.
First, some quick fixes for summer. As ever, my number one is Triteleia Queen Fabiola, a spin-off from the cut flower trade and cheaply priced at about £10 per 100. Queen Fab holds clustered heads of pale violet flowers on stems about a foot and half high. She is not hardy, but if planted in late April she will usually survive a mid-May frost. I use her bulbs in small groups near the front of borders. In July they flower, making an exotic edging which flowers for at least a fortnight. If you have a new garden, short of colour, give them a try in a sunny place.
I reviewed recently the book Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden by Jacqueline van der Kloet, Holland’s queen of bulb planting. She is not at her best on summer flowerers. She picks only six favourites. Three of them are alliums, which are over by early June, two of them onion lookalikes, and one is a dahlia, the single-flowered Honka Pink, which she mixes with ornamental grasses but which most of us rank below the lovely double varieties, much too good for drab grass.
She picks only one gladiolus, the white murielae which used to be called acidanthera, but here she misses a trick I like to emphasise. This lovely corm flowers late in autumn, sometimes too late to escape frost in much of Britain. The trick is to plant five corms 2 inches deep in a pot 6 inches in diameter, and start them off in a greenhouse or a heated place in late April. When the corms develop their second pair of leaves, usually by late May, they can be sunk outdoors in their pots and left to flower in August. A start in a warm place accelerates them and makes them excellent value, scented too, before any frost threatens them. Unfortunately, corms treated in this way will not flower again in a second year. Like Queen Fab, they are cheap and readily replaced.
I would major on other gladioli too, none better than the small-flowered Nanus varieties, flowerers in July if planted in the next fortnight. They are fairly hardy: last year’s corms have come through this non-winter. I like the white varieties marked with red and in reverse, Atom edged with white, one of many good ones offered by those kings of gladioli, Pheasant Acre Plants in Llangan, Wales. I lost mine in winter 2022-23 but replaced them in spring 2023 and am well stocked.
I would also pick three bright summer flowerers which give a range of colours and textures no annual ever does. Sparaxis is sometimes marketed as the Harlequin flower, but the popular name has never caught on. This corm derives from South Africa and is at home here in light sunny soils where it will survive slight frost. Its thin leaves do not hide the bright multicoloured flowers with dark centres, red and orange being dominant colours, held at a height of about a foot. Sparaxis cut well too if you would rather use them as an edging in a cut flower bit of the garden. I use them in the gaps in new borders, admiring them as rapid givers of colour, again at very little cost. They are easy choices which make beginners seem like experts.
Their companions, also from South Africa, are ixias. They too have a little- used everyday name, “corn lily”, and are quick to flower at a height of about a foot. In sunny light soils they will last through all but the hardest winters, but I like to give new-coming ixias the acidanthera treatment, starting them, five to a pot, in a greenhouse this month. They are then hurried into flower and by early July are looking bright in the gaps in new borders. I like a rainbow mixture best, but individual colours have now been selected. In the Netherlands the excellent catalogue of Nijssen Bulbs offers one named after Eos, the saffron-robed goddess of the dawn. At €13 per 100, it is a bargain of a fine yellow ixia.
I never do well with round-headed ranunculus in open ground, but I succeed with the more exotic tigridias, such excellent choices in hot seaside gardens too. Unlike sparaxis, they do best when planted 3 inches deep in rich soil and occasionally watered with a liquid fertiliser. They deserve their popular name of peacock flower as their three petalled flowers are so spectacular: why are they not more popular, easy beauties for a sunny courtyard? Whites and pale yellows are my favourites.
These choices are old stagers here, but later in the year the options have increased. Among the pink nerines of September and October we now have amarines, free-flowering crosses between nerines and heavier-flowered amaryllis. I am impelled to try them by van der Kloet and her book’s favour for them, bulbs which we did not have 20 years ago. Their advantage over ordinary nerines is that they will produce up to 10 stems from one bulb in sunny deep soil.
Van der Kloet and the growers consider them to be frost hardy in a south-facing sunny bed. Like nerines they should be planted only up to their necks, leaving their tips above ground. The flowers have up to six petals, resembling nerines more than top-heavy amaryllis; van der Kloet describes them as looking like pink agapanthus.
Maybe a mixture of colours is the best way to go, combining pale pinks and deeper rose-reds. In a big pot they are said to be great too, exciting additions to a pre-planned autumn and ones which will multiply from year to year. Look ahead, order and plant them now.
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