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.