OK, straight into the ‘what I’m doing and why now?’ section.
You may have noticed that we’ve recently added this to the newsletter. It comes from my life-long (well, since 17 years of age, when gardening got its claws into me) frustration with how often garden books and mags tell you when to do something in the garden without telling you why that moment is the best time to do it. The point is that if I know the ‘why’, I can usually make informed decisions about how much flexibility there is in the timing, as well as how the timing should be adapted or fine-tuned for my very particular climate (and where in Australia is it not a particular climate?).
This is why we’d love you to share your wisdom about when you’d be doing that same job in your climate. For reasons of managing spam, that unfortunately means signing in, which if you haven’t already got an account, means making one. But it’s free, and we’d really love you to contribute your knowledge of your climate. It’ll be so useful for other readers from the great diversity of climates our country presents (or climates our planet presents, given that we’ve plenty of non-Australian readers as well).
One of the things I have to get to this week is the final cutting down of a bit of rough grass/meadow into which daffodils are planted. I’ve already left it too late. They’ll have pushed up through last years vegetable wreckage, which I’ll now only be able to cut down to the height of their growth. I should take note exactly when they appear, so I don’t make the same mistake in the future. In other parts of the garden I have grape hyacinths in grass and these kick into growth as early as February. So I have to make sure I’ve shaved the grass back by then, as there isn’t another chance until well after they flower in September.
It’s one of the challenges, of course, with incorporating spring bulbs into any other mixed planting. You need to make sure that you’ve cut all the surrounding gear down before the bulbs appear so that 1. their growth isn’t compromised by shading and 2. you can cut without having to be painfully careful around the bulb’s new shoots. Bulbs may be the perfect seasonal complement to naturalistic plantings of perennials, but they’ll totally dictate how long you can leave last year’s dead stems standing. I’m reluctant to remove perennial stems before late August/early September (as discussed in this newsletter on 25th June), but if I have, say, tulips amongst them, I’ll have to have them all cut and removed by now, in mid winter. It’s a tradeoff. You can leave your perennials standing until early spring, or you can have bulbs planted through them. But you can’t have both.
How do you manage the cutting back for bulbs? Do you, like me, consistently push the boundaries, and suffer the consequences? (Click here to go to this same content on the website, and add your wisdom).
The above pic is of the remarkable Te Henui cemetery in NZ. A small team of volunteers under hugely enthusiastic leadership have transformed this otherwise unremarkable site into a deeply thrill garden. Why not see it with us, and meet the inspiring leader of the team, when we go there in November? See details of our North Island tour here.
Have a great week
Michael
My husband does the mowing and I can’t trust him with looking out for the bulbs new growth so I only plant bulbs in pots, so I don’t have to deal with this problem. It also means that I can hide them when they don’t look so good. Not ideal but you can place the pots anywhere and of course I make him carry them from place to place! Nikki (NZ)
Sounds like a good – or at least necessary! – strategy. Of course, if you gave over an area to ‘rough grass’, that wasn’t mown for a period of the year – perhaps with paths mown through it, you could get around that particular problem. But I understand that many mowing husbands would never ‘get’ the concept!
You said it perfectly Michael – it’s knowing the “WHY” that is crucial! After all, us gardeners are tuned to the feel of the season, the feel of the weather. We’re always going to go by feel!
I can only imagine that we’re rarely told the ‘why’ because so few garden writers understand the ‘why’. And, of course, reasons change with the times, but the old advice seems to stay the same. For instance, in my early days of garden reading, I couldn’t understand why it was made to sound necessary to prick out of seedlings, and slowly pot them on into larger pots. It was years before I eventually extrapolated from the advice that the reason this was habitually done in English gardens was to save glasshouse space, which is always at a premium at sowing and pricking out stages. Having said that, there are good reasons not to pot plants on into much larger pots than they need (though even that is questionable, now with modern, very free-draining mixes), but the primary reason was to do with space efficiency. And that’s really not relevant if, like most Aussies, you’re sowing your seeds outdoors.
I, too, will have this problem, but I have learned that I will need to walk past some areas of the garden and deal with them later. In one area where I plant zennia seeds, the dieing leasves need to be pushed away with a heavy sigh.
Yes, so, so few jobs get done right when they should. But if we know the ‘why’ of the counsel of perfection, we can take a better guess at how much we can bend the rules, yeah?
Some of the ‘whys’ are of no account. One example is the notion of waiting until frosts have passed before cutting back roses. I never get this one and happily ignore it to no ill-effect.
Yes, this is one of the classics of redundant garden advice. I know people in suburban Melbourne that still work on this principle, when I’ve never known rose foliage to be burnt by frosts in Melbourne. I came home from Italy in October last year to find new growth on my wife’s roses burnt – not sure what by, but it’s possible it was frost – but they shot away strongly and flowered brilliantly anyway, albeit after a slight delay.
And in any case, you couldn’t/wouldn’t wait until October to prune them! They’d have shot away strongly by then, and you’d be cutting off a heap of new growth, which would be as detrimental as the frost.
So glad you ignore that one. Everyone should
My father in law planted his bulbs in curved lines that ran around the farm dam and under the trees. It was a practical solution to simplify the cutting back of the lawn to allow the bulbs to come through. When I first saw this approach , I thought that’s not for me , but much later I used the same approach and planted blue bells in a row to follow a curving drive. Made a great display and easy to manage the very dense grass growth that we get all year round