Day 29 - Sorting the filing cabinet of a gardener's mind

I have to confess. I misled you yesterday. I promised a look at summer bedding. We will come to that, and it will be an interesting mix of dreadful mistakes and sublime combinations. But first of all, I have the odd chronological interspersion to consider to get the feel right, and I have also in the interim been through my photographs and discovered where I misfiled some of my tulip pictures. Let's be honest. This is a blog, not a book, and as such, its form is that of the daily outpourings of my mind. That will never be as co-ordinated as a finished book. It may become one, and I sincerely hope it does. It would be nice to collate everything into a coherence it no longer has in my memory, to artificially distort what is left inside me and make a story out of it. For now, though, it is what it is. This is me putting down on the screen my thoughts as they come to me. You are reading this as it arrives on the page. When it becomes a book, you will be able to say how privileged you were to witness its gestation in its raw form.

So. Some more tulip pictures.

Not a great picture, this one, but it shows an experiment I tried, underplanting the bulbs with both a white forget-me-not and a pale yellow wallflower. This was far more effective than the photo demonstrates, as the lily-flowered Tulipa 'White Triumphator' goes through a creamy-yellowish phase on the way to turning white, so we achieved subtle blends of harmonious colour over time with this plan.

In the next one, a year later, we can see that I tried the same three tier effect, this time using the tulip 'Shirley' to better effect than before.

I'd got into the groove by this time, and a couple of years later I continued the theme of putting forget-me-nots and wallflowers together under the tulips. This time, however, I tried something different with the bulbs, and selected three varieties of bulb all in a very similar colour range, but planned to flower consecutively, with a two-week interval between varieties. The timing worked a treat, and provided colour over a longer period than normal as a result. I suppose it was a slightly lugubrious colour selection, but with hindsight, looking back at the picture, it didn't look bad, despite not reaching the heights of some of the schemes I had chosen with a lighter palette.

Another year on and I was experimenting with pink forget-me-nots and white tulips, as below:

I also tried using viridiflora types, with a green band down the outside of the petals, but never felt that these gave a clear enough show of colour, which always seemed somehow diluted by the green interfering with the primary colour. This one wasn't too bad though. I had used worse in the past, which I haven't shown you.

Then we went for an old favourite, 'Angelique', which is a good tulip, but was far too little of a statement for my taste, despite fitting the bill for a pastel garden very well.

To contrast with this, in our other bedding area that year I used much stronger colours, but the photograph only shows the bulbs partially opened, with most of them still to show colour. This was another viridiflora type, and again probably worked well in close-up, appearing quite dark over a distance.

The centrepiece shows them off better:

By my last year on the job, I had arrived at the strong, clear displays with which I started this excursion a couple of days ago. I now had a firm idea of how I wanted it to look, after many years of experimentation. I'm not going to repeat those photographs. You can always go back and look again. What I will show here is how I was now beginning to repeat the tulips used in the bedding schemes in the mixed borders and urns elsewhere in the garden to take up and repeat the theme to impart a continuity to the whole.

And my photography was getting better, now I had a digital camera.

But only sometimes!

OK. So it has been a long haul, describing only one small aspect of running a large garden. I've managed to fill it with plenty of pictures and ideas. I know people like pictures, and they bring it to life, but there is more to this than meets the eye, you know. If nothing else, this blog seeks to show the whole story, warts and all. Getting our tulips to the peak of perfection (or in some cases, mediocrity) each year was fraught with complications. We were under attack the whole time. Rabbits didn't bother with the bulbs, but they did like a nibble at the grasses that we eventually edged some of the beds with. We used to put them off with the protection we used against badgers to an extent but it was never 100% successful.

Our first problem was pheasants, though. They have a disconcerting habit of waiting till the flower bud just begins to appear at ground level, and then nipping it off and devouring it, so that instead of delivering beautiful colour, blind spikes come up, complete with gnaw-marks. We worked out a strategy against this, but it was laborious. We built frames out of treated timber and chicken wire to enclose the beds until all danger was past. It was quite a pain building to a hexagonal pattern, and even more of a pest having to lug the things out every autumn after planting, but needs must if we were going to have a display for the visitors in the spring. Here's one I made earlier!

It turned out, when we gave up with this tedious system, which prevented us maintaining the beds, and always required two of us to be present to remove them, that our main nuisance wasn't actually pheasants, but badgers. The south parkland had a bank that had a number of setts, and we found that on hard winter days, when the ground was too solid to dig easily, they would come into the garden which was much softer, having been opened up by us during the planting. There they would proceed to lift whole bulbs, in large quantities, stripping off the outer succulent leaf-scales and leaving the nasty, tough, embryonic flower-stalks all over the lawn as evidence. The only cure for that was an electric fence, which we erected late every autumn after the visitors had left, and took down again in the spring when we started mowing again. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job.

Most of our visitors weren't challenged by badgers, but in case you are, a low fence, strung with two wires, as shown, does the trick. They won't pass it. Desperate rabbits will jump it, naturally.

And tomorrow, something completely different to challenge the gardener.