It consisted of four quadrants, sharply delineated by box hedges, behind which was a spring bulb meadow, full of crocuses, daffodils, anemones and autumn crocuses to finish the year. In between, froths of cow-parsley would arise and wave in the dappled shade cast by the trees. Following these, we would cut the grass down, rake it off, and await the Crocus speciosus in September.
It sounds perfect, but in truth, when I arrived there a few problems were evident. Firstly, the hedges were uneven and gappy where odd plants had died out in dry summers. Then I noticed after observing how the area performed in its first year that there were sizeable blank patches which would benefit from more bulbs. I made an approximate mental note of the position of these and resolved to deal with it the following winter. The hedges were a longer term project, and I was not prepared to invade the territory of my colleague in this first year by taking them on immediately.
And now I must admit to the mistake I most regret in this garden. Most of my other aberrations were easily rectifiable, but when you get the bulbs in a meadow wrong, it is difficult to do anything about it.
How did it happen, and what was it I did that I so rue to this day? Well, I looked at what was planted there and saw clumps of tall, blowsy daffs, orange trumpets, double flowers, I saw the occasional tulip there too, and I decided that this was another example of the quirky approach of an essentially amateur gardener designing his own eccentricities into the plot. I didn't go so far as to import a host of tulips into my scheme. To my eye, tulips are too formal, too sentinel-like for a rough bulb-meadow (sorry Prince Charles, I know you have them at Highgrove, but I don't like it).
What I did instead was to look back at my own experience and take my lead from there. The trouble was that I had limited previous with naturalising bulbs, my only major excursion in this direction having been when employed by the council in the parks. Of course, I knew the principle. Throw them down on the ground, plant them where they land. On the council I had been sent out to supervise the two blokes who emptied the bins in the park to plant up bulbs around the lake banks. I showed them how to do it, and they quickly adapted my methods to the 'fuck this' approach. We had had 15x25kg sacks delivered, and this was a daunting task for people who weren't gardeners by any stretch of the imagination. They decided on a more efficient, if less aesthetically desirable solution to the problem. They dug square pits, the width and the depth of a spade, and tipped bulbs from the sack to fill the bottom of the holes. I wasn't there to see the result the next spring, but I have a feeling that blocks of evenly-spaced massed daffodils in parallel lines across the banks wouldn't have looked ideal.
This is not to say that I advocated this method of planting in my new garden. Far from it. But I did order tall daffs by the sackload, including one batch of double ones as far as I recall, and we packed them into the spaces as I remembered them. They looked OK in the end, but my regret is that I didn't go for a more traditional planting of dwarf bulbs, more natural-looking Welsh daffodils, for example. I shouldn't have let myself get led astray by the apparent quirks of the original plantings. I found out later that the gardeners had a habit of planting out spent bedding bulbs in the borders, and some of these oddities, such as the Tulips, may have come from such practices, and not from any real plan. It certainly explained the massed hyacinths in one of the shrub borders!
Here are a couple of pictures some six years on from the new plantings. It doesn't look bad. It wasn't that grave a mistake, and the daffodils and anemones look well together -
Close-up they looked like this -
And naturally, it was a bonus to have large drifts of autumn-flowering crocuses in the short grass in September. More about that tomorrow.
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