Snapdragon's garden

Baby Moon

The bright blue skies and warm sunshine are really bringing the garden on - everywhere I look there are new flowers beginning to bloom.

My favourites this week are these tiny narcissi Baby Moon - each flower is about an inch - with an amazingly powerful  exotic scent. 

I have had some in the house for the past 10 days or so - replacing the narcissi ziva in the old spongeware tureens -  and they scant the whole house, not with the sweet scent of forced narcissi, but with something much more exotic and spicy  and there are others in pots outside the greenhouse. 

I am going to plant them into sparse grass when they have finished flowering and hope that they will survive into next year - their foliage is pretty grassy and they are just the right scale to work.

Black and white

The world of flowers is a fashion driven one.  And though I like to think that I'm really not a fashion person, that is of course complete nonsense.

Over the part 10 years admiration of colour theme gardens like Sandra and Nori Pope's amazing garden at Hadspen in Somerset, and the espousal of rich saturated colours by gardener/florists like Sarah Raven have seeped into my buying.  I have ended up with far too many dark flowers in my patch.

Partly I think that this may be something to do with hardiness - the darkest dahlias, columbines and gladioli also seem to be the hardiest - but also the seduction of bulb and plant catalogues.

Perhaps it was the cold driech winter, perhaps it has been this chilly spring, but suddenly I have had enough of my black flowers - I want some fairground colours back.

There is an exception though.

Our bathroom is monochrome - floored with marble reclaimed from the Chambers Street Museum in Edinburgh, papered with a reproduction of an C18th french map; tiled with slate from snooker tables.  It is a beautiful, elegant, haven of a room.

It is made for monochrome flowers.  At the moment there is a single stem of a navy/black columbine - impossible to photograph with any justice without spending time with reflectors and lights.  However, it is wonderful to soak in the bath, contemplating its complicated form.

Mount Tacoma

I had a few of the white tulips left over from last week's wedding and put a couple in a tea glass on the windowsill above my sewing machine along with some sweet Cicely.

It has come out over the week and now looks more like a peony or rose than a tulip.  Given the absolutely hideous weather we have this week it is lovely to have such a pretty view.

Friday 13th March

The cherry branches that I cut 10 days or so ago are now in full flower.
All you do is cut the twigs/branches and put them into water.  Once I found some peach prunings lying in my father's garden - they had been there about a week - we brought them indoors, recut the stem ends and put them in a vase - within a week there were beautiful pink flowers.
The cherry is "arranged" in a big pottery vase and under it are some narcissi left over from a photo shoot earlier this week.
Some in a floristy clump
and others in stoneware bottles
 I have an enormous collection of vases - as you might expect - but to be honest 9 times out of 10 I end up with a few stems each in a line of bottles.
Please excuse the weird blurry window - it is a shot double glazed aluminium framed horror that will be replaced when we extend the house this year - its funny though, having lived with it for 5 years, I no longer notice it until I take photographs.

Flowers in my home

I've had so many e-mails about forcing branches for inside that I thought a sporadic series of postings about what flowers are about in the UK (Northern branch) now might be interesting.  The easiest way seems to be to highlight the flowers that I have in my own home at a particular time and to explain how to grow them and condition them to be inside.
In some ways this is going to be frustrating - in that planting obviously needs to be done well in advance - but hopefully some of the ideas will be useful and I shall be able to collate them into a more useful form in the future; probably through the newsletter.
At the moment these are the flowers in my hall iris reticulata planted up into some old bowls.  I am a sucker for old sponge-ware bowls and use these for a selection of bulbs from December through to April.

The iris are Iris reticulata "pixie" and were planted in late autumn into a loose mix of potting compost and vermiculite in those blue mesh like mushroom boxes that organic mushrooms are delivered in; these seem never to be returned to the grower as I see lots lying around outside shops and restaurants on bin day.  They are very useful. 
The bulbs in their tray were then left outside the greenhouse for 10 weeks to get properly chilled.  This develops the shoot.  Then they were brought into the greenhouse in batches to force them into flower.  I don't put heat under them, the 2-3 degree hike in temperature just convinces them that spring has arrived.  You can leave them outside if you don't have a greenhouse, they just flower a couple of weeks later.
Then, when you can see the flower inside the leaves, I carefully prise them out of the compost and re-pot them in my bowls; bulbs are quite happy for a short period without drainage.  This will work with those pots of spring bulbs that are in garden centres and flower shops now.  Just water them well and tease the bulbs apart before potting them into a cup, bowl or teapot.
The sticks in the vase behind the iris are birch; hopefully their bright green leaves will start to emerge in the next week or so.  I also have some cherry branches and odd prunings of clematis, rose and daphne dotted about the house to see what happens.  I won't get any flowers from the rose but there should be leaves.