My winter flowering jonquils are poking up through the ground already, a handy reminder to get spring bulb orders in.
Lots of gardening tasks can be postponed until you have time or the spirit moves you, but ordering bulbs isn’t one of them, put it off and you miss the boat for an entire year.
February is a great time to settle down with a cool drink and a couple or half a dozen bulb catalogues. Get going now and you have plenty of choice, especially if you’re on the hunt for something new and different.
A vast range of beautiful, high quality bulbs is available to Aussie gardeners so it helps to give some thought to your climate before embarking on a spending spree.
A vast range of beautiful, high quality bulbs is available to Aussie gardeners so it helps to give some thought to your climate before embarking on a spending spree.
Knowing where a bulb originates in the wild is a useful guide to what you can grow. Highland and inland gardeners in NSW who experience winter frost find it easy to cultivate tulips from mountainous regions of Central Asia, which need a period of storage between two and 12 degrees Celsius in order to set flowers, but bump into a brick wall with South African freesias and sparaxis.
Subsoil moisture is another limitation. Gardeners like me who have shallowish soil and dry summers always struggle to grow bulbs originating in damp meadows or woodland like Dog Tooth Violets (Erythronium) and many fritillaries (Fritillaria) and snowdrops (Galanthus).
Mind you, hit on something that’s all too happy in your garden and you may regret it. Watch out for members of the ornamental onion (Allium) family.
They might come with a grower’s glowing recommendation and an artfully flattering illustration, but many will spread by seed as well as bulb offshoots and are highly invasive.
One allium (apart from essential garlic and shallots for the cook) that is totally safe in my garden is A. siculum (aka Nectaroscordum dioscoridis, available from Garden Express, www.gardenexpress.com.au/). It has clusters of pendent, greenish brown flowers on 40-centimetre high stems in late spring, loves dry shade and is slow to increase. An easy bulb that will grow almost anywhere yet isn’t invasive is the Dutch Iris. It flowers three or four weeks before bearded irises in various shades of blue, yellow and white and new varieties come on the market every year in exciting colours. Hancocks Daffodils have a wide choice (www.daffodilbulbs.com.au/) including dark purple “Acapulco”, Wedgewood blue “Hildegarde” and snowy white “Casa Blanco”, among others. Hancocks are also currently offering a sometimes hard-to-find favourite, Arab’s Eye (Ornithogalum arabicum), an easy but non-invasive member of the Star of Bethlehem family (avoid O. umbellatum, which in the right conditions is in the Oxalis class).
Arabs Eye grows to about 60cm. and in late spring bears clusters of white, bell-shaped flowers with an endearing black eye formed by the nectaries and developing seeds. It comes from the Mediterranean region and is frost hardy in my garden, where it grows happily on a dry, sunny bank.
I invariably run out of space when writing about bulbs, so more next week.
