How to choose Spring bulbs and other spring favourites for your pots next year
How to choose Spring bulbs and other spring favourites for your pots next year
I take you behind the scenes of a magazine shoot. PLUS: a show garden update, dates for meet-ups, and some fun with potatoes.
I can’t even begin to bring myself to tell you about the timings - of course it’s what I’d expected, but there’s nothing like having an image in your mind of what things should be like, to add to the longing
Welcome to subscribers old and new - it’s been another wonderful week for new subscribers, and I want to give you a great big welcome into the fold of The Gardening Mind.
As you’ll soon discover, it’s a super-friendly place, and whether you like to quietly observe or join in with the Chats and courses, I think you’ll have found your people. That’s what it feels like to me.
I regularly host Zooms for paid subscribers where I explain to you how to find your way around The Gardening Mind. Here’s the next one:
‘Finding your way around The Gardening Mind and how to use Substack’ on Wednesday 21st February at 6pm UK time.
And if you’re wanting to start the Small Garden Design Course, you can join here - it isn’t too late. And there’s a zoom coming up for this too:
On Sunday 3rd March at 5pm UK time, there’ll be a Zoom for anyone who’s following the How to Design Your Small (or large!) Garden course - we’ll get together and talk through experiences so far, and it’s also a nice opportunity to chat with newly-made acquaintances here on The Gardening Mind.
We had our regular Show Us your Plots session last Sunday on the Chat - if you haven’t yet joined in, please come and say hello - we’d love to see you there. Look out for the upcoming post which starts off with “It’s Sunday 18th February and it’s time to SHOW US YOUR PLOTS!”
So what does The Gardening Mind have in store this week?
There’s the regular show garden news
You might have seen that I’ve been able to finally share the news about the Pots of Style series for Gardens Illustrated which I was secretly working on all last year. I’ll be taking you behind the scenes, divulging the ups and downs of trying to get Mother Nature to work to a timetable throughout the year.
And to finish up….
Something which could be quite ridiculous:
I’ve decided to host a Chit-along on the Chat. A kind of ChittaChattalong
But first of all, it’s time for some show garden news
So.... what's new? Well first of all we have a deadline issue - it's today. And being honest, as I promised you that I would be right from the very beginning of this series, I have to tell you that as of yesterday morning, we missed the planting design deadline. Who knows what this will mean? Will we even have a show?
Having designed and built 14 RHS show gardens over 15 years, and a few show gardens in Japan and Russia too, I’m well-used to the ups and down of this strange old world of building gardens that last a week or so, before dismantling and taking them to their forever home. If you’re a new Gardening Mind member, I think you’ll enjoy these articles about making gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, which you’ll find in the Show Gardens section.
When you read these tales of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, you might be asking yourself a couple of things - a. why would I do it, and b. why would I do it again? My answer to you is that I’m never going to run a marathon; I’m never going to climb a mountain just ‘because it’s there’.
But show gardens? Well, it seems that creating show gardens is my marathon, my Everest. There’s something about the lure of it , the pull, the desire to experiment with new ideas and show people new ways of doing things, that for years, I haven’t been able to say no to.
So you’d really think I’d have learned my lesson by now, but it turns out that
clearly, I haven’t. Having spent the last week in the Pacific NorthWest, in a time zone 8 hours earlier than the UK, we had more deadlines in a week than I think I can ever remember having had before. So rather crazily, in the dedication to duty, I decided to keep myself as near to UK time as possible, which involved 6.30pm bedtimes and 2am starts so that I could keep in touch with my team.
We've finally submitted planting plans, which has been an interesting exercise as we know a lot of the plants won't be available in China. This was the deadline we missed, but the good thing is that it seems to have slid under the radar - maybe they set us a fake deadline before the deadline in order that we’d meet the deadline - who knows? All I can tell you is that we all breathed a sigh of relief when nothing was said.
Creating planting designs for a different country in a whole other continent is quite a big deal, and to be honest we had expected it to be so right at the very beginning - it couldn’t not be difficult. Trying to be practical, we’d asked for some nursery lists so that we could do some research and select plants from what would actually be available - you'd think that would be a sensible approach, wouldn't you? But instead we’ve been asked to submit a list of plants; our allocated landscape contractors will then take the lists to the nurseries and the nurseries will tell them what's available, and then that availability will be reported back to us.
In the meantime, I need to ensure that everything is as comprehensible as possible and that nothing gets lost in translation, so colour-coded hard landscaping plans are being drawn up so that everything about this really complicated, never-been-done-before structure is as clear as it possibly can be. Here’s an example of the kind of thing we’re putting together - images to go alongside details of every single corner of the garden:
Keep an eye on the Chat for further updates!
Let’s come back to Spring bulbs
And the February issue of Gardens Illustrated is out! My goodness, that’s been a hard one to keep quiet: a whole year of creating inspirational container planting, keeping in mind the idea of something for everyone. I’ve loved reading this regular series for as long as I can remember, so it was a very quick ‘yes’ from me when I was asked, back in the autumn of 2022, if I’d like to write it, and work with the fabulous photographer Jason Ingram.
That’s over a year ago - for that’s how long these things take. If you think about it, plants need time to grow in order to look good in a pot, and I wasn’t going to cheat by shoving a group of plants into a pot on the morning of the photo shoot - although I do have to confess that at some points I was sorely tempted to take a few shortcuts. So I sat down and drew up plans for each ‘episode’, the first of which was to be for February 2024 - that’s NOW!
February is the month when the Spring bulbs start to scatter and dot themselves through our gardens - in flowerbed, lawns and pots, these tiny little garden gems decorate the soil with spots of colour, injecting a massive uplift of cheer and wonder whenever they emerge, as if by magic, always a surprise and a delight.
So I selected some of my favourites, my tried, tested and trusted bulbous friends, including Narcissi ‘Minnow’, N.‘Elka’ and Fritillaria meleagris, along with some perennials so that there would be a good selection in the final article, and when the order arrived a few weeks later, off I went to my friends at Water Lane, planted up the containers, and so the adventure began.
Did you know that plants don’t always do what you want them to do?
With Jason the photographer booked in for a certain date, I checked the plants on a regular basis. In theory, they should have been ready, and they had indeed started to poke their noses out of the soil, but then they decided to put the brakes on. It had been cold, and they just stopped growing.
And then, when they eventually did start flowering, they decided to do things at different times. Well of course they did - where would be the fun in everything going smoothly?! But I had taken no chances - I had created around a dozen different options. some of these options will probably appear in Gardens Illustrated at a later date, so I’m keeping them up my sleeve for now, but here are some of the ‘rejects’:
There’s Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’ and Iris ‘Scent Sational’ on the right. On the left, I had a fritillary in a jug, and I’d lined up some beautiful primulas from Hayloft Plants - I’ll be looking at these with you another time. Looking at Lizardy Kate in these photos reminds me of Christopher Lloyd’s description of this dwarf iris:
“‘Katharine Hodgkin' is a vigorous and easy hybrid, classed as a Reticulata but probably with I. winogradow blood. The flowers are speckled and streaked all over, yellow, grey, off white, in a somewhat reptilian manner.”
Katharine Hodgkin is indeed a funny flower - there is something super-strange about those markings and those colours of sludge that are at the same time somehow the colours of the sea.
This is where that jolie-laide pretty-ugly (not pretty ugly, I hasten to add) smudgily-brilliant Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’ comes in. For, if you can take a very quick pause for a moment and think about your iris bulbs as you’re hastily shoving them in, try to plant a light-coloured one BEHIND anything darker. This way you create a spotlight for darker petals, with Ms Hodgkin’s lightbeams behaving as the perfect background.
I can’t even begin to bring myself to tell you about the timings - of course it’s what I’d expected, but there’s nothing like having an image in your mind of what things should be like, to add to the longing of things to turn out as you desperately long for them to be, so that you can share the ideas in pictures. Yet, there I was, turning up at the nursery, to see the hellebore container looking fabulous and just as I’d intended, and the violas popping against the tightly-budded fritillaries. As far as container planting is concerned, this concept had never bothered me before - the plants can do what they like, when they feel like it, as far as I’d always been concerned. That is, up until now.
Eventually, though, everything did turn out, and it’s brilliant to be able to share them with you, however many years the waiting game did shave off my life. While I’m on this, I’d love to hear your favourite pot combinations - and also anything that you find doesn’t behave for you in a pot.
A variety of containers had been the brief, and so a variety of containers I delivered. Old buckets from my garden, jugs from my kitchen, a beautiful bronze platter I’d used in a show garden1, and metal containers bought online and in junk stores - I had been absolutely determined not to run out of options.
What the whole process of putting these collections together did remind me of, was the effect you can create by grouping together containers of different sizes. Going back to the idea of unity, these containers have something that links them all, whether it be the materials - in this case, steel - or the colours of grey and green. Keeping it simple doesn’t necessarily mean keeping it all exactly the same; just a thread of something uniting the groupings helps to keep everything easy on the eye.
Some of these containers you see here, didn’t eventually make it on the day as they’d flowered too early, and some too late: these tulips had been destined for an April feature, but had decided to arrive too early, so you won’t see these appearing on the magazine pages either. This skewing of timing is almost always bound to happen, so I’d recommend that you avoid setting your heart on a specific combination, and instead have lots of options, small pots, platters, dishes and vessels that are easy to move around and arrange in satisfying combinations when the flowers appear.
I worried about these pots every single day from November 2022 though to February 2023. Every single day. But it turned out ok, and everything was all right on the night: Jason arrived, set up his camera, chose his favourites.
and with a flash and a bang, he made the magic.
You can read the article in this moth’s Gardens Illustrated - in the meantime, here are some outtakes for you. And having worried about it every single day, I have to confess that I really am glad that I accepted the challenge. There’s so much more in store for you through the year, and I can’t wait to reveal the plantings that I’ve put together.
There’s something so enchanting about these little spring bulbs: the pale lemons of the narcissi, converting all those who think they have an aversion to the colour yellow. The surreal chequerboard patterning on the snakehead fritillary is just as magical - in this bucket, its tiny dotty checked patterns are picked up by the teeny tiny leaves of Muehlenbeckia complexa.
Green, green and more green - Spring colours of lemons and fresh green along with the more surprising moody hellebore hues of winter.
If you’ve ever read the Pots of Style series, you’ll be familiar with the individual portraits of each plant that accompany the feature. These are true works of art, and Jason’s approach is nothing short of masterful. You can tell there’s a genius at work when they casually plop a few plants in an old wooden crate and come up with this:
This arrangement wasn’t actually used in the final selection - can you imagine: there was a photo which was even better than this?! I’ve included it here for you as it is truly painterly.
And now it’s time for a bit of fun - I’ve decided to host a Chit-along on the Chat. A kind of ChittaChattalong
I floated this idea at the beginning of the year, and I’ve finally got round to launching it. It could be totally ridiculous, but it’s just a bit of gardening daftness, or daft gardeningness, which could be fun and very possibly could be ridiculous.
Chitting potatoes means encouraging the tuber to produce strong, short, stubby green shoots before planting. It's the practise of making potatoes start to sprout before planting in the soil.
I’ve just ordered my first early seed potatoes, Arran Pilot and Caledonian Pearl, and I’ve decided to post regular, not quite daily but almost, photos of them chitting on the Chat. And I want you to join in with getting some seed potatoes , chitting them and then sharing the photos…. who’s up for it?
In terms of photographic thrillingness, it very will possibly be the most boring thread in Chat history, but there’s something about the idea of seeing who chits first, which really makes me smile. So I’ve ordered mine… who’s up for it?
You may of course be chitting already…..
If you’re new to the Small Garden Design course, it’s not too late to join:
You may be wondering how to catch up: there have been a couple of updates since this post and so after you’ve taken your photo:
you’ll want to visit this post with the first task
then the Chat where you can upload your photo and notes
Our Real Life Meet-up at Water Lane
In case you missed this announcement, our first garden meet-up of the year to be announced will be at the wonderful walled gardens at Water Lane in Kent on