Bulb orders, and why the best spring gardens are planned in autumn
Here is the uncomfortable truth about spring gardens: by the time you want one, it is six months too late to have one. The garden you stand in next April gets decided in the next few weeks, while the soil still holds its summer warmth. October is the best planting month of the year, November runs it close, and September is when you set both of them up: the orders in, the plan made, the ground ready. Professionals know it. Garden centres would rather you found out in March.
The drought first. As I write it still has not properly broken, so everything from July and August stands: deep, occasional water for anything young, and leave the lawn alone. Brown grass is dormant, not dead, and it will green up within a fortnight of real rain, which is more than can be said for most things you could spend that water on.
The bulb order, honestly
Every catalogue this month will offer you a hundred varieties, which is a lot of ways to spend money on things that flower once. So here are five of my go-to bulbs, the ones I order year after year for the gardens in my care and would plant in any garden in the county.
Daffodils. The backbone. In this month, while the soil can still root them before winter, and then they come back stronger every year for decades. Buy one variety in quantity rather than a mixed bag: three long drifts of fifty look designed. Sixty of everything looks like an accident.
Crocus. The cheapest transformation available to anyone with a lawn. Crocus tommasinianus scattered through the grass in the hundreds, planted where they land, left to seed themselves into a colony. A hundred crocus costs about the same as two coffees. Unlike the coffees, they come back every February for the next decade.
Camassia. The answer for our heavy Cambridgeshire clay, which most bulbs merely tolerate and camassia genuinely likes. Metre-tall spires of blue in May and June, thoroughly perennial, happiest naturalised in longer grass. If your soil sulks, camassia will not.
Leucojum. The summer snowflake, which flowers in spring, because botanists enjoy a joke. It wants the damp, heavy ground everyone else complains about, and it stands taller and later than a snowdrop, white bells on proper stems. 'Gravetye Giant' is the one worth having.
Alliums. Purple spheres floating over the border in May, bridging the awkward gap between spring and summer, with the best seedheads of anything I grow. Thread them in repeated drifts behind hardy geraniums, which rise on cue to hide their dying ankles.
You will notice tulips are not on the list. I rarely order them for the gardens I look after, and the honest reason is that in most soils the showy varieties dwindle after their first spring, which makes them bedding rather than an investment. If you love them, buy them the way you would buy fireworks: happily, in November, and without expecting them back. The five above come back, year after year.
And those five are the start of it, not the end. Sixteen bulbs get the full treatment in The Bulb Guide: depths, spacings, densities per square metre, what goes wrong and how to head it off before it does. It is the most comprehensive bulb guide out there. I would say that, because I wrote it. But I wrote it so it would be true.
Everything on this list goes in during September and October, while the soil holds its warmth. Plant at two to three times the bulb's own height, deeper on light ground, and throw each handful down and plant the bulbs where they land. Random beats careful every time; the eye finds a straight line at fifty metres.
The wisteria catch-up
August's summer prune has run into September for several of the wisterias in our care this year, and if yours has too, cut anyway. A fortnight late is a rounding error. Not at all is a plant that gives you leaves instead of flowers next May and then acts as though that were your fault. The whippy green growth thrown out since June goes back to five or six leaves from the main framework, and the winter cut in January finishes the job.
The last of the hedges
The final hedges of the season are being finished now, before the bigger projects start. The late-summer cut is the one that holds: yew, box, hornbeam and beech trimmed now keep their crisp line right through to spring. Nesting season is all but over, but the rule has not changed: ninety seconds walking the line before you cut, every time. The fine for destroying an active nest is considerably more than the hedge is worth.
The design season begins
September is also when the drawing board comes back out. Quoting and marking-out for the autumn and winter design projects starts now across the gardens we work with, and the reason professionals build in this half of the year is simple: plants established through a mild, damp autumn hit their first spring already at home. A garden designed in September is planted by Christmas and looks intentional by May.
You know the saying: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is not spring, whatever the internet tells you. It is now. One honest note on the diary: implementation is currently booking for autumn 2027. Design consultations are open, and that is the sensible order anyway. A garden designed this winter is drawn, costed and first in the queue when the build slot arrives.
Plan it this month. Plant it next. And when the whole thing comes up looking intentional in April, the neighbours will assume you hired someone. Let them.