Spring Bounty
How wonderful it feels to be picking flowers again, after a good month of busy weeding and mulching, and before that a nice cosy sleepy winter. Blossom, bulbs, hellebores; all the spring lovelies are ready now, and the garden puts on huge amounts of growth each week, especially with all the rain we’ve had lately.
We didn’t plant any tulips last winter. Although they are highly gorgeous and we love to have them in a vase in the kitchen, slowly opening and changing and growing enormous, when we sit down to work it out we realise that they just don’t make enough of a profit for us. The cost of the bulbs plus the labour of digging trenches to plant them in, balanced against the price we can charge for them when inferior but cheap mass-produced tulips are also available, means that even if the bulbs flower for three or four consecutive years, the profit margin is only very small. And sometimes they get tulip fire. So instead we have been getting very excited about other spring flowers such as narcissi (which bulk up year on year and eventually need to be divided to keep them vigorous), hyacinths (chunky and satisfying and fragrant and fun; and most varieties return), and hellebores, which are so exceptionally pretty and have the added benefit of flowering over a long time, so that we don’t need to rush out and pick them as soon as the flowers show their heads. On the contrary, we are holding ourselves back with this crop, waiting to harvest until the central flower on each stem has made a fat seed pod or the base of the stem feels rigid and strong and ripe, for a good vase life. They keep looking good into mid-May, although actually, even though we have lots of plants and have recently put in lots more, we never in fact have any left to pick by the end of April as hellebores are so in demand. They like it cool and shady, and rich light soil for their roots. We’ve planted them at Stokesay in a place like this by our high North-facing wall, with hydrangea ‘limelight’ bushes for companions and a deep annual mulch of woodchip, which they love.
