Five tulips to plant now

Late November, and the colour is slipping from the trees; down, down to the gardens and lawns, down to streets and pavements, grass and slabs strewn with discarded finery in shades of scarlet and copper and gold. The wind has been fierce, whipping the leaves into a frenzied dance, a kaleidoscope of burnished flecks whirling around me as I walk, swooping and bobbing in front of my face. I watched a leaf trapped in a doorway, caught in the eddying wind, unable to break free and find the way out like a fly by an open window, exhausting itself with frantic effort while being unable to comprehend that the simple way out of its present situation lies less than a few inches away.

Sensations and events can act as milestones in our year, not merely marking how far we’ve come and have yet to go, but providing an invitation to pause and to take stock of where we are. This gradual bleeding of pigment from the landscape, this ballet of the leaves in the wind and a cold that rasps my hands and face – the combination of these familiar experiences reminds me that now is not the time to retreat indoors and go to ground till spring, but instead the long awaited time to plant tulips.

There are so many, and no matter how much care you lavish upon planning your spring display, you are always bound to end up coveting the form or the colour of a tulip you see growing in the garden of a friend or neighbour. But by the time you’ve seen it, it’s too late to grow it that year, and so you bide your time and wait until the ground is sufficiently cold to plant safely the bulbs without fear of rot and disease that the tulips of less patient gardeners might fall prey to. Mid to late November is the season to begin planting tulips, and I’m starting now.

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Five tulips for planting now

These are not necessarily the best or even the most fashionable of tulips. They are simply the five that form the backbone of the spring display in our garden, which is based on an understated monochromatic scheme with a bit of fun, pink froth to lift it. They are reliable, either elegant or cheering, easy to grow and, importantly, not difficult to acquire.

Plant the bulbs deep. The accepted wisdom is twice the depth of the bulb, but if you can plant them at a depth of about 10 inches with a little grit at the bottom of the planting hole they will perform more reliably year after year on our heavy local soil. It goes without saying, do try to plant them the right (pointy) way up. Contrary to popular belief, they won’t grow downwards – plants are intelligent enough to know which way is up (something called geotropism) –  but they will waste energy in righting themselves which could otherwise be channelled into the flowers.

Name: 'White Triumphator'
Type: Lily
Colour: White
Height: 70cm
Flowering time: Mid May
Notes: Elegant, large and pure white, lily-shaped flowers.

Name: 'Queen of the Night'
Type: Single
Colour: Black/Purple
Height: 60cm
Flowering time: Mid May
Notes: Deep purple, almost matt black petals with a velvety sheen. Stunning – if I had to have only one, it would be this.

Name: 'Black Parrot'
Type: Parrot
Colour: Black/Purple
Height: 55cm
Flowering time: Mid May
Notes: As fascinating in bud as in flower, looking like some exotic vegetable. Not quite as dark as 'Queen of the Night', but not far off. The parrot tulips have fringed petals, and air of the decadent baroque.

Name: 'Purissima'
Type: Fosteriana (Botanical)
Colour: Creamy white
Height: 45 cm
Flowering time: April
Notes: The first of our tulips to flower, this is a robust, tulip-shaped tulip, in a soft creamy white. A yellow centre is visible inside when the flowers begin to open up. Also known as 'White Emperor', which might explain why I received a job lot of them one year instead of 'White Triumphator'. A happy accident, though.

Name: 'Foxtrot'
Type: Double Early
Colour: Opening white, then shades of pink
Height: 30cm
Flowering time: April
Notes: These are a treat, opening white and then blushing to shades of a gentle pink with darker pink highlights. The double rows of petals creates a fringed effect, almost paeony like. Very pretty indeed.

Cold addled

It would seem that the grass has at last had the decency to stop growing, or at least to slow its rate of growth to a level appropriate for the time of year. This is fortunate: the ground is getting wet and claggy now as our local clay is wont to become at this time of year, and continued trundling back and forth with mower and heavy boots is liable to compact the soil and exacerbate any drainage problems. Some traffic will still be necessary until all the leaves are off the trees – and then off the grass – but for a few weeks over winter it will be good to give the turf a rest. In spring when the risk of ground frost has past we can think about aerating compacted lawns, but it will need to be drier than now or else the clay smears and becomes impermeable, making matters worse.


I welcome the change in routine. Much as I can appreciate a well-tended lawn, there can be no denying that a smooth green sward exerts a kind of tyranny over all gardening activity for at least forty weeks of the year. Having converetd most of the lawn to flower and vegetable beds in my own garden I lose no sleep over a crop of dandelions or the odd patch of bee-friendly clover, self-heal or daisies in what little grass does remain, but even here there is no escape from the weekly cut. I really prefer the longer look of a wildflower meadow, especially if it has an inviting path cut through it, beckoning me to wander between the tall grass and flowers. This is a form of grassland management requiring significantly less input in terms of time, fertilisers and other chemicals – which adds up to significantly less money, all positive benefits which I am keen to point out to anybody who will listen. Not to mention that allowing flowers in your lawn provides a valuable nectar resource for bees and other pollinators – the arguments both environmental and economic are well rehearsed and to hand and, while I haven’t yet succeeded in introducing a meadow in every garden under my care, it’s a work in progress.

But it’s almost winter, and these are matters for spring. Nobody will be thinking about their lawn until the new year, unless it is to bemoan its transformation to quagmire as an ill-judged slipper-clad foray across the garden provides an education of a muddier nature. And because there’s little to be done to the lawn in winter, I spend a few happy moments planning what long-delayed tasks I can at last get around to; building new compost bins and turning the heap, completing the dog proofing of the boundaries, moving and splitting fallen logs. Until I realise that the reason that there’s little to be done to the lawn in winter is not only that it is colder – which slows down those biochemical processes required for the grass to grow – but also that there is less light, as there is, quite literally, less day. And so consequently I come to the understanding that I have no more time than I had before; probably, in fact, less, and these tasks still need to be crammed in to ever shorter daylight hours. Rather obvious really – clearly the neurons are not firing at peak efficiency. I blame the cold.

Mast year

It is raining acorns. They land with a sharp CRACK! upon the aluminium roof of the landrover, amazingly causing no dents. A less bell-like tone is produced when they fall upon the greenhouse, or upon the garage roof, but a steady percussion is now building to create a sustained accompaniment to the afternoon’s artistry. I am in the process of attacking a neglected woodland understory with an improbably small, but nonetheless viciously efficient hand saw. And all the while, it is raining acorns.

2013, it transpires, is a good year to be a pig. Apart from...you know. Sausages. But, right up until the moment when it becomes absolutely necessary for such matters to be broached – porcine sensibilites aside – a free ranging pig must be one of the happiest creatures alive this autumn thanks to the abundance of choice tree fruit blanketing the ground. Layer upon delicious layer of your favourite food – not just apples (the apple harvest is fantastic this year, and so it should be considering how poor it was in 2012) – but acorns too, just as choice a delicacy to a pig. This year will go down in the records as a mast year, a year when the harvest of mast – defined as the fruit of woodland trees – is particularly abundant. And while trees such as oak, ash, beech, hazel and chestnut (sweet and horse) are producing impressive crops, the effects are likely also to be seen in the trees and shrubs in our gardens, with an exuberant clothing of berries on hollies and rowans and hawthorns, to name but three.

The exact cause of this phenomenon known as masting is not entirely understood, although it is clearly linked to both weather and climactic conditions, and it has been observed that some species, such as beech, exhibit this behaviour on a regular cycle (approximately every ten years, although this has become shorter in recent decades). All of this has clear implications for our native wildlife, as the effects of an overabundant supply of fruit and nuts cascades along the food chain. As well as being good news for garden birds and fetching field mice, populations of less welcome creatures will also be seeing a significant increase come spring; the thought of an explosion in rat numbers creates a not altogether heart-warming picture. Still, we should never have got rid of the wolves and the boar and the bears, so it serves us right.

Quite apart from which, all of this reckless superfluity has clear implications for my lawn mower, as more than one of my gardens borders on the woods and now boasts deep insulating piles of acorns across where once emerald turf shone forth. Optimistically I had hoped the mower would sweep this into the grass bag. Sadly, while the second lowest setting on the blades sees the machine ignore the acorns altogether, the lowest height succeeds in mashing, rather than collecting them – mashed acorn being even more difficult to pick up. The leaf rake buckles under the weight (piles of acorns are deceptively heavy), and the leaf blower too is surprisingly impotent in the face of so much brown shrapnel. Leaving me no option but to shepherd them into great piles, and manually tip fistfuls of the things into the barrow. I really don’t want a lawn full of oak seedlings. Undeterred, it’s warming work on a cold autumn day, and I have a plan to roll out the scarifier on them next time I visit.

But still, for a while longer, it is raining acorns.

Autumn days and chocolate buttons

Autumn, at its best when days are dry and cold and bright, can throw some truly nasty weather at you. The light rain forecast for this morning turned into a lengthy downpour so heavy that the water somehow managed to flow back along the underside of my hat brim before encountering a brow furrowed against the elements, at which impenetrable barrier it abruptly turned course and proceeded to flow down my face. Puddles formed inside my boots as rivulets of rain coursed down my legs, almost making me regret this morning’s selection of shorts over long trousers, although my prepatellar bursitis – a knee affliction common to plumbers, housemaids, carpet fitters and apparently gardeners – continued to approve of the choice (the stretched fabric of a longer leg when kneeling down causes increased pressure on the lump above the knee; annoying rather than painful). I came home briefly at lunch to walk Bill, threw my sodden clothes into the dryer, and promptly managed to melt all the buttons. I can only conclude that they had been manufactured from chocolate, leaving me nursing a sense of regret at the thought of a missed snack opportunity.

Undeterred by the weather or the state of my clothing – billowing precariously in the chilly wind which had by now replaced the morning’s rain – I continued with the day’s toil, barrowing leaf mold and manure to the borders and coppicing overgrown hazels in the woodland area, all the while thankful for the capacity of the lawn grasses to survive a thorough muddy trampling.

It was gloomy and muddy and damp and cold – so far from the ideal autumn day I carry with me in my head. And while it may have been the frisson caused by the knowledge that at any moment a freak gust of wind could overpower the last remaining fastenings on my shorts and see me chasing my dignity across the rose garden, I think it is more the raw and elemental quality of the days at this time of year that makes me feel particularly present in the moment, particularly alive. I snapped a few hasty pictures on my phone on one trip back from the bonfire in an attempt to capture something of the feeling. Some are even in focus.

So here’s to autumn days, whatever the weather. And here’s to long autumn evenings by the fire, sewing on buttons.

Some elements of this composition are in focus. Just not the ones you’d expect.

Ivy stems on oak trunk