cyclamen | And the garden

Hardy cyclamen are wonderful plants, quite unlike their trashy indoor cousins.

I have a particular weakness for scent, autumn colour and plants with winter interest, and although unscented the ivy-leaved (or Neapolitan) cyclamen excels in the latter two categories, sending up its charming pink recurved flowers in the autumn, and most obligingly holding on to its heart shaped leaves, intricately marked with silver, over the winter months, shedding them over the summer when their absence goes unnoticed in the midst of all the other star horticultural performances.

I really should investigate Cyclamen coum, which flowers from December to March and would take over nicely from the September to November flowering of C. hederifolium, but I have read that if planted together C. coum will in time (which is relative – centuries, probably) come to dominate, so I will have to wait to find a source and a good spot. However their circular leaves are unmarked and nowhere near as interesting.

The greatest downside of C. hederifolium, if one wants a swathe of them (and who would not?), is their cost. Even my first choice of bulb supplier, Peter Nyssen, was charging over £1 per tuber. At this point, I turned my beady and acquisitive eye towards my unsuspecting mother. My mother is not a gardener but she is hugely generous of spirit and has a lovely garden, blessed with great drifts of hellebores and, I remembered covetously, hardy cyclamen.

When we were building the house and lived for almost five years in rented accommodation with a pocket handkerchief of a garden, she made me up a horticultural care parcel containing plants from her garden which I arranged together in a planter and which lifted my frustrated gardening spirits no end. (In the preceding sentence I use the term ‘made me up’ as a euphemism for ‘allowed me to plunder her garden during one of my visits, digging up what I wanted, and leaving it for her to wrap in damp newspaper and post them all up to me in a cardboard box’.) There were a number of cyclamen tubers in this planter, and I had noticed that the flowers had set seed – those seedpods on curious little coiled springs – and that many had germinated into seedlings, a year or so old. I resolved to turn out the planter, carefully, and prick out the seedlings into a tray of jiffy modules – why, I would soon have hundreds of hardy cyclamen. Pricking out seedlings is soothing pastime, providing one sets up the bench or table to avoid being hunched over and getting a crick in the neck or between the shoulder blades, and I spent a restful and virtuous sunny October afternoon doing just that.

Pleased though I was with my labours, I recognised that it would be many years before the pinhead sized tubers produced any flowers, so I turned once more to my mother and asked her, with what I hoped was engaging directness, whether she would dig up some more tubers and send me them (or ‘instruct Tim who comes on Wednesdays to dig up etc’). Again she obliged, and Parcelforce duly delivered two boxes filled with magnificent tubers, some bigger than my hand (see photo below). I have no idea how old they are, and while the literature relates how they can grow to the size of dinner plates, I have found nothing that gives a timescale for this development. Readers, if you can shed some light, I would be delighted to hear from you.

The tubers themselves are odd, unpromising things, with hardly any roots, and it is difficult to imagine them ‘throwing up hundreds of flowers’ per tuber, as the books would have them do. Bought dormant from bulb suppliers, many have no roots at all and it is often difficult to know which way up to plant them. Planting any bulb, I think, is an act of faith, but cyclamen require belief of Orpheus-like proportions.

Out of curiosity, I also ordered some tubers from Peter Nyssen to compare, and a plant from Crocus, and then succumbed to buying some more tubers when I was in Dobbies (despite the recent mis-labeled anemone experience), to see which would give me the best results for my time, effort and money. Contenders in my unofficial and woefully unscientific hardy cyclamen trial are:

1) Five dormant tubers from Peter Nyssen (photo below left) – £6.50

2) Five dormant tubers from Dobbies garden centre (photo below right) – under £10

3) Two boxes of tubers from my mother’s garden, semi-dormant (i.e. freshly dug up and showing some signs of root or leaf growth) – free, but clearly not everyone has access to such cyclamenic munificence

4) 300+ seedlings – free, ditto

5) A plant in a 9cm pot from Crocus (photo below) – £2.99

The plant (by its very definition in a non-dormant state) from Crocus was the real surprise, with that little 2cm tuber throwing up dozens of leaves and all those fine root hairs. If the dormant tubers lumber into life with anything near this fecundity I shall have veritable carpets of cyclamen, I’m just finding it incredibly hard to believe this with any conviction. Having planted them this winter – a bit shriveled and apparently dessicated, with their crowns just below the surface of the soil and hopefully the right way up – I am not sure when I should expect signs of life, especially since winter is normally their non-dormant season. Might I have to wait until September to see the first leaves? I just know I will not be able to resist digging one of them up to check whether root development is actually happening, and I hope this doubter’s impatience will not irretrievably damage the plant*.

I went to check on the tubers from my mother that I planted in the beds under the pleached limes, only to find to my annoyance that their stems have been neatly severed, and a few leaves left on top of the mulch. The culprits are our resident rabbits, and I will position some cloches over the cyclamen while I hone my plans for a multi-pronged attack on the blasted creatures.

I will update this post with progress on the plants over the course of the year. Yes, you have heard me say that before, but remember this is still a very young blog. You may or may not have noticed that I have resorted to copying and pasting comments under my WordPress posts that dear and valued readers have put on my Facebook page. I have been wondering what I could do to attract more comments, suggestions and questions to these posts – I would love to get some dialogue going. Is it because WordPress requires some horrid sign in process? Clearly, if this is the case then you are hardly likely to sign in in order to tell me so. If you prefer, you could tweet me @AndTheGarden? Perhaps this too is merely a matter of time, and comments will emerge in the natural order of things. Or, for that matter, not.

* Should I ever be in the privileged position to name a new species of cyclamen, I shall call it Cyclamen eurydice, and take my chances at being smacked in the face for being such a smart arse.

While there was still some money in the garden budget, I invested in six pleached limes. That’s invested, you understand, not splurged. Our house is made up of a series of different sized boxes (or pavilions, if you are an architect), and the garden needed a boxy counterpoint of its own to balance things out. The account of the delivery and planting of the limes this past May is for another post, as is the reconnection of the phone lines we dug through in the process; this post is about what I planted at their base, last week.

Long view down the large unplanted back garden towards the contemporary house

A green box to counterbalance the built boxes

The trees, Tilia cordata or small-leaved limes*, are arranged in two rows of three in a rectangular shape, like the six on a domino, and my initial idea was to grow the crowns together and prune them with straight sides and top to resemble a shoebox on six stilts. This idea faltered as I started shaping the outlines in situ with bamboo canes, as it dawned on me that it would be impossible to prune the middle of the top of it – the lid of the shoebox – without annual scaffolding or a crane. Whatever shape they took had to be maintainable by one woman on a tripod ladder (another investment). So the current plan is to train the external sides into the shoebox shape but leave a hole in the middle, completely hidden from view unless you are standing right under it. Once a year I can emerge through the hole at the top of my ladder, to tame the flat expanse of leaves. Like Venus rising from the sea, except clad in overalls and wielding a petrol-driven hedge trimmer.

But what to plant beneath them? Since the purpose of the trees was to serve as a mass of green, suspended in space, this ruled out shrubs and anything tall enough to detract from that shape, or even to mask the uprights of their clean trunks (more on this repeated design feature in another post).

Ornamental grasses were and to a certain extent still are a possibility, but their May to November season of interest is too similar to that of the limes, although I grant that the trees will contribute sculptural winter presence through the structure of their bare stems. I love my adopted country and have lived here in Fife for longer than anywhere else in my life, but no one would deny that winters here can feel long, wet and bleak, especially having lived in Italy. Gardening in Scotland has taught me that one should plant for the winter, because the summer can look after itself (insofar as any keen gardener can bear to let it).

Under the limes, I decided, would be a changing swell of green ground cover, punctuated by successive waves of a single species at a time. The golden stamens and rich purple petals of Crocus tommasinianus ‘Whitewell Purple’ kick off the year in February, followed in March to April by a yet to be decided silver leaf lungwort (Pulmonaria angustifolia ‘Sissinghurst White’, probably) – and alas, since my supplier has sold out, also yet to be bought or planted. In May, as the first young leaves of the lime begin to unfurl, the flower spikes of snakeshead frillitary Fritillaria meleagris emerge tall above the foliage of the lungwort. There is then a hiatus over the summer as one’s attention is drawn elsewhere in the garden: the clean lines of the green shoebox serving as a calming foil to the adjacent horticultural excitement.

Coinciding with the leaves on the limes turning first yellow then burnt orange, September marks the appearance of the delicate little pink flowers of the hardy autumn flowering cyclamen Cyclamen hederfolium, which continues to throw up flowers throughout October. Unaccountably, colour combinations of pinks, oranges and yellows, even blues, that would give me pause at other times of year somehow please me immensely in the autumn (nerines, I’m looking at you**). From November to January the baton would be carried by the green foliage of the pulmonaria and the cyclamen, both marked and dappled with silver.

Crocus tommasinianus ‘Whitewell Purple’; Pulmonaria angustifolia ‘Sissinghurst White’; Fritillaria meleagris; Cyclamen hederifolium. First three images from Peter Nyssen online catalogue – I will take my own photographs later this year.

My bulbs duly arrived from Mr Nyssen, the cyclamen tubers (subject of their own future post) dug up from my mother’s garden, and spurred by the memory of the tulip bulbs that lay mouldering reproachfully in their paper bags until January one year, I set to work ~~immed~~ within the fortnight.

Preparations underway for the planting of crocus and fritillary bulbs with cyclamen tubers.

When planting large numbers of small bulbs in a defined and virgin area, you are just as well taking off a whole layer of soil and positioning the bulbs on the surface of the ground. Once you are satisfied with their arrangement – I favour the ‘random scatter with judicious tweaking’ method to get the artless drifts I desire – you poke them gently into place and backfill the soil. This is also an opportunity to ferret out and remove the roots of any perennial weeds, and then you have lovely friable soil into which to plant any small herbaceous plants: in my case, the cyclamens and the virtual pulmonarias.

Working off planks left over from building the deck allowed me to define the edges of the two beds beneath the rows of limes with a half-moon edger, and vitally, it kept me from compacting the squelchy soil. A high micro-water table runs across this part of the garden, and I really ought to have mixed in barrow loads of grit to improve the drainage, but I … didn’t. Until recently the area was a muddy field with no vegetation at all to hold it together and to moderate water flow, and it is my hope that the trees will dramatically improve the drainage, as will the rough grass I have sown. I recognise that this is lame. Still. The fritillaries and pulmonarias should love it, C. hederifolium is reputedly the toughest of the lot, and both the beds will be covered in a 5cm layer of fine bark mulch. I’m just glad I didn’t pay too much for the crocus.

In a year’s time I will post a photographic record of how well this all worked: man proposes; God (and weather) disposes. A further wave of snowdrops in January may yet be added, in part because I might find the wait for the crocus too trying, in part because I have crates and crates of them, dug up from my previous garden.

_________________________________________________________

* I blush to write this, but there was a time when the only lime I knew was the citrus plant. Reading 19th C literature at Uni, I would be disconcerted – fleetingly – by references to grand houses reached by imposing avenues of stately limes, vaguely imagining gravel drives lined with rows of vast terracotta pots.

Spot the difference

** Nerine bowdenii, one of my many guilty pleasures

And the garden

When modern architecture goes outside

Tag Archives: cyclamen

Pinheads and Dinnerplates

One thing after another

Share this:

Share this: