Planting spring bulbs - pink tulips and muscari

I hate this time of year with a passion. Every day when I get home from work its dark and freezing and on my one gardening day of the week, Saturday, it without fail rains. Nothing is growing with any great speed and im stuck inside no doubt feeding my face. The whole situation is thoroughly depressing. But there is one silver lining. Its bulb planting season! And this means I can be frivolous with my credit card and plan wondrous displays.

And frivolous I most certainly have been. My credit card has gone for a lay down. Although the bulbs in today's post I ironically didn't buy. Today we are talking the spring pot. The infamous pot that the mother crams as many bulbs in as physically possible and always turns out stunning. How all the little 'fellas', as bulbs are in my mothers eyes, manage to fight and elbow their way to the top I don't know, but despite being layered up like a cake they do.

This is a flavour of last years' rather red and blue pot 

I have been over how the pot gets planted in the past, most people know how its done, so im just going to focus on the planting scheme. I wasn't so thrilled with this years pot, too much sun ruined the timings and the colour palette of orange and blue didn't work out quite as well as I had hoped. I expressed an interest in doing a nice girly pink pot as it started wilting. Because everybody likes a bit of pink in the spring. Well I have delivered.

Next years pot will be pink, white and blue if it turns out as the packets promise. Which nobody can guarantee! And it should be absolutely stuffed. Im not sure we have ever put so many bulbs into one pot before, but no doubt it will still work. As ever the only rule for the spring pot is anything that goes in it must be an early bloomer.

If my memory serves me correctly now nestled right at the bottom is narcissus 'tresamble'. There has to be a daffodil of some kind in the pot and I chose tresamble because it should be near enough white. I like a nice white clean daffodil, and I didn't want too much yellow. Knowing my luck it will be full on cream.

Next up is Margarita. She is a big blousey pink tulip which should bring a nice feminine feel to proceedinsgs. She isn't our usual style for the pot, we normally go for something more striking and structural but its nice to have something different.

Carrying on the pink theme is tulipa 'lilac wonder' which is a worrying name for something that promises to be pink. I really like the look of these, small cup-shaped pink flowers with really bright egg-yellow centres. In my mind these will be the real stars of the show.

One of my absolute favourite spring flowers which I have spouted endlessly about before is muscari. These are literal perfection in my eyes. Anything that looks like a tiny bunch of blue grapes is great in my eyes. Which is why I have bought them in white. No, I have never tried the white ones before so I was obviously itching to give them a go. I have never even seen a white one but they will fit in with the theme of the pot nicely and hopefully I will love them.

But you can't just have muscari in white so the variety with the contrasting top knot are back too. Last year I grew a plain blue variety which I wasn't so keen on so I have gone back to my original favourites. The top knots get me every time. Can't wait.

Basically everything in this pot thats pink is a tulip and little beauty is no different. I feel this little cherub of a flower is what ties all the rest of bulbs together. These tulips contain each of the colours in the pot; white, pink and blue. The combination promises to be quite striking, even though they are only small in stature.

Finally the top layer contains two quite similar small flowers. Scilla siberica alba and chionodoxo forbesii. One is blue with white centres and one is just plain white. And thats all I have to say about them because they are really very similar. But also no doubt lovely when they flower.

We planted all the bulbs one sunny saturday in late October so all we have to do now is sit back and wait for for the magic to happen. Indoors preferably.

Spring flowers - Muscari and euphorbia

My favourite spring flower - muscari.  I just love them anywhere

It seems spring has finally sprung, at long long last.  I began to feel like I might never see the sun again and it hasn't even been that bad a winter.  With the spring comes one of my favourite little flowers.  It may be small, but boy is it perfectly formed.  Muscari, commonly referred to as grape hyacinths, are literally little bright blue bunches of grapes on a stems.  I love them in pots, I love them in sways, I will take a grape hyacinth if it popped out of anywhere.

For this reason they are a firm fixture in this years spring pot.  But they are not the only grape hyacinths in our garden now.  The mother, I love the woman, but she just can't throw anything away.  So instead of chucking away last years spring pot bulbs she dug a trench under the hedge at the bottom of the garden and stuffed them all in there in the hope that we might get a second display.  A second display is exactly what we have got.  There are a few red tulips, a few mini daffodils, but far more importantly, my favourite type of muscari.

My favourite type, a little smaller and more delicate but with two colours

I just love these little guys with their contrasting little topknots.  I would say I prefer them to the ones I bought this year, Il have to keep this in mind for buying bulbs for next year.

What a daffodil! Peachy, frilly, big and blousy.  There is nothing not to love
about this specimen 

Another bulb I am thrilled to see again is this fabulous daffodil.  What a beauty, I love the contrast in colours and the interesting structure.  Its just a shame I have to duck down under a tree and virtually climb behind a bush to see it, but its so worth the effort.  Last year we had three bulbs of this beauty, but this year its been reduced to just one.  Clearly the mother didn't keep them right over the summer.

I love a good muscari on mass, they make such a pretty carpet of blue

Something I rather enjoy doing on a boring afternoon is wandering the streets of a neighbourhood looking at peoples gardens.  Odd but true.  I just like nosing at what other people do, Im not expecting to see anything groundbreaking but its all interesting.  One garden had a lovely swathe of grape hyacinths. While I am clearly besotted with this little flower I don't have the room to let these little guys do what they really should: create a little blue sea across a patch of green.  This one garden on my trip had really done this well.  Grape hyacinths should always be grown with friends.

Finally moving on from my favourite subject another joy were these euphorbia plants.  Towering high above my diminutive height in a great clumping bush, these vibrant lime green plants really struck the eye.   I really enjoy the structure of this plant with its little disks stuck out on tiny stalks.  Reminds me of a famous textile designer I had to study at uni. I personally wouldn't want one, but I enjoy it in other people's gardens.

Euphorbia is a funny plant really, its all so green! I really like the shape of what I imagine are the flowers though, little disks on stalks.  This garden looked great with these great lime green clouds

Lastly was this strange beast.  I will happily admit I have absolutely no idea what this plant is, I have never seen it before as far as I know.  I love round things so the perfectly cylindrical hanging fruits/seeds/things? appeal greatly.  It was a very tall plant but very striking one.

Planting Spring bulbs

The first layer-narcissus, the mother really likes to nestle the bulbs down into the compost by gently screwing their bums down into the soil to they are snuggly nestled in

So bulbs all chosen its time to discover how the master (the mother) manages to cram so many bulbs into one pot.  Yes, all those bulbs I featured in my last post are going into just the one pot.  You may think, thats clearly not going to work, but it will!   All that is needed is a large pot, a bag of compost and, a billion bulbs, and a furry little helper.  Oh and the sun, she never plants this pot unless it is a sunny day and on cue ten minutes in, out it popped.

Any time your doing anything in the garden, the puss has to muddle in

Yes she always likes to get involved and at this time of year sitting on the patio would result in a cold bottom, so she snuck onto the compost bag while the mother nipped off to do something.  The way this works is the mother writes on the front the depth in inches the bulb would find preferable, then basically totally ignores it.  There simply isn't room to put them all in at their own desired depths, with enough soil at the top and bottom and between each layer, so the depths are taken with a pinch of salt.

One naked Tangerine Dream who accidentally got shucked during the planting process.  Rather than leave the shucking in the pot the mother felt the need to clear it out, because she likes 'a tidy pot'  

So a nice wedge of compost went into the bottom of the pot, then the narcissus as they wanted six inches,  then the tangerine dream tulips went in on top of a thin layer of compost.
The Shogun and Gavota tulips both wanted to be at three inches so they had to endure sharing the same layer, lets hope they don't mind sharing the bed, as it were.  The section on the packet describing the distance to leave between each bulb and the next has to be completely ignored at this point because those bulbs have to really get in there, rub shoulders and snuggle.

Shogun and Gavota tulips 

The essence of this is a little like putting nuts in a layer cake.  Again the crocus and muscari had to share a layer two inches from the top, cramming in tight, but they will be fine.  I know it looks like there wont be room for the lower bulbs to fight their way through the tightly packed upper layers, but somehow they do, don't ask me how.  You may think why not spread the bulbs out amongst several pots, but thats the real joy of the mother's spring pot.  It bursts out, a riot of textures and colours, and it is impossible to part the upper layers to see the soil below.  Im not actually much of a traditional 'spring bulb' fan, although they are slowly winning me round, but in context of this pot I do think they work really well.  More in this case, is definitely more.

Thats a lot of bulbs to fit into a layer but we managed it, crocus and muscari

The finishing touch to the pot is a nice layer of pansies on the top to give colour all through the winter until the bulbs pop out.  Again, not a real fan of the pansy as a plant generally, but these 'citrus mix' in bright yellow, cream, orange and white where so bright and cheery, I relented and allowed them in.  I find pansies very uninspiring, but the mother rummaged through the whole display to find a pack with one of every colour and now they are planted they don't seem too bad.  At this point we should just be sitting back and waiting for the spring, but something is sprouting up little green snouts out of the soil, not the plan so I will keep a beady eye on what the bulbs think they are doing.

The pansies, although not really flowering at this point at least add a bit of green, because pictures down into a pot of bulbs in soil are only so interesting

And finally a treat, and another bit of green, this little guy was wandering across my compost clearly off to somewhere