An ode to spring bulbs

And all the wintry existential crises they have unknowingly prevented

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers and members of The Wild Garden club.

• It’s a guide to growing spring bulbs - the happiest, most beautifully fragrant and hopeful flowers on the face of the earth.

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In just one week, autumn will be upon us.

The beginning of autumn is like an amazing first date you once had at the start of what eventually becomes a totally disappointing relationship. It starts so well. Everything is new and exciting and beautiful - there’s a frisson in the air and you think ‘ ‘Yes! yes! This is for me. This is wonderful. This is amazing!’

After all, the beginning of autumn really is perfect; golden light, hazy afternoons and crisp mornings filled with bird song. It’s dreamy and no one can blame you for being besotted…

But you know what happens when you date early autumn? You marry mid-winter. Those hazy golden days vanish to the ether and before you know it BAM it’s July and your socks are soggy, the days are 3 minutes long and no one is doing ANYTHING FUN EVER.

As you may have noticed, I have very mixed feelings about this season.

I think my ideal world would be one in which autumn and spring lasted 5 months each, with two months left to split between summer and winter. The truth is I don’t actually hate winter, it’s just too damn long. And reliably, every year by the time June 20th rolls around I’m cursing the weather, accidentally falling asleep in front of the TV at 8pm and ‘working from home’ (aka in bed… in my pyjamas) a lot more than I care to admit.

Do you feel the same? Does winter linger like a raspy cough and leave you bored, antisocial and sullenly wishing for summer?

If it does, I have one small suggestion. Plant bulbs now.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is nothing more hopeful than a spring bulb. Right at that low point, right when you’re certain those grey-sky days will unfold unendingly across your dreary lifetime, just when you’re losing hope that summer, mangoes or coconut scented sunscreen ever existed in the first place, that is the moment the tentative green head of a tulip will nose its way cautiously out of the soil, proving your pessimism gloriously - wonderfully - wrong.

It might sound ridiculous that someone could derive so much pleasure from a little pot of bulbs, but don’t knock it til you’ve tried it.

Spring bulbs are one of the most magical and life affirming flowers, popping up without warning when the rest of your garden still feels bare and forlorn. They are early messengers, their big, perfumed floral heads breaking into bloom and shouting out at you in their giddy, shrill voices ‘Take heart! Summer is coming!’.

Don’t you just think if these daffodils could talk they’d do so in a hysterical falsetto?!

Get the timing right

First thing’s first, you need to get your timing right. So many people who want to grow spring bulbs shoot themselves in the foot before they’ve even tried by missing the bulb planting ‘windows’ that occur many months before the bulbs actually bloom. When I was just starting to get obsessed with gardening I always missed the cut off - I would only realise how desperately I wanted to grow hyacinths, tulips and daffodils once September arrived, and by then it was most definitely too late.