Virus Iris and the Dahlias

I have always been “into gardening”. When I was fourteen I was employed to tend a neighbour’s beds, after I put a hand-written sign on our gate post touting my (very cheap) services. The neighbour seemed surprised that me – a lanky, awkward slip of a girl – got stuck in and transformed her front garden for a small fee, and so she took me on once a fortnight. I liked the work, and I like the fiver I earned, but I always hoped the homeowners were out during my shift. I was quite antisocial really, and the though of bumping into “the husband” petrified me.

I dug my Nanny’s borders, helped Mum out with the lawnmower and loved the transformation even a quick garden tidy-up could achieve. Growing things is satisfying, and being outside is very good for the teenage, angst-prone brain. I remember my greenhouse (I called it mine – I commandeered it) and spending many hours pottering inside it after school, loving the smell of the hot soil and the sound of the rain on the roof. I was quite blasé about people’s houses, but if they had a nice garden, I was suitably impressed.

Clearly, I was no plant expert – but I do recall that for one of my birthdays (my fifteenth, perhaps) the lady along the road gave me D. G. Hessayon’s books on houseplants and shrubs, and given my propensity for revising, I studied these with gusto, and consequently felt like something of an authority in horticulture. It’s fair to say I was a peculiar teen.

Over the years, I have retained my interest in gardens, but when my kids were little, it was all I could do to keep the weeds at bay. When Number Two was a baby, we had just moved to a bungalow with an immaculate garden. Before long, it was looking very wild, and not in a good way. It seemed like an impossible task – to get half an hour to weed the borders without being interrupted by a grisly, colicky baby who could not be put down even for a moment.

Big Seymour likes gardens, too. He loves a healthy green lawn, well-trimmed bushes and flower-laden camellias. He likes a rhododendron too, but ask him about bamboo and he will start to sweat. I am not sure why – maybe he’s had bad bamboo experiences before. I for one think bamboo can be quite interesting. (Pandas like it so it can’t be all bad.) Big Seymour is all about the landscaping , and therein lies a shared interest; he knocks up the foundations, I chuck the plants in.

But I am still very much learning about gardens. Only now, in the age of the internet and computer phones, is one able to take a picture of a plant and instantly discover what it is called! There are garden influencers all over my “feed” and whilst they can be quite repetitive, they do provide the inspiration to try new things, and clear up myths about what plant goes with what, where you can get the best bargains and the optimum time to sow seeds (if you can be arsed – I have failed miserably this year).

Now my kids are that bit older (ok, two are actual adults) I have rediscovered my gardening mojo, and it’s about time. For we have a large blank canvas here at our old cactus nursery, and Big Seymour and I are embracing our gardening era. He trawls marketplace for statues, fountains, cypress trees and other outdoor curios that are going for a song, and I attempt to work out what to plant next to them. Right now, we have far too many projects on the go, but in the last year we have started digging a massive pond, half erected (and sunk) a greenhouse, acquired (but not built) an orangery, levelled up some of the front lawn and filled our new cottage garden with flowers. I even have a massive, healthy lupin for the first time ever! I have succeeded with verbena, finally got the wisteria going and last year’s ginormous hollyhock looks set to return. There is a whole lot of gardening still to do – we have many more plans, but when you realise that the garden is not a chore but your actual hobby that you enjoy, life feels a whole lot less overwhelming.

Last June, I took my friend’s advice and started to follow gardening reels, and have dabbled in new projects this year, namely – large scale tulip planting. I grew a handful of tulips last year, and they were lovely. Sainsbury’s was selling off mixed packs of flower bulbs really cheaply, so I bought several and for a few months outside my back door, I had a lovely display. No fuss – just put them in and up they came. Tulips, fritillaria, grape hyacinths, interspersed with a few choice weeds that happened to join the party.

But this year, after seeing what some people can do with bulbs and pots, I tried to go all out. I actually purchased (and selected) tulip bulbs with fancy names, dynamic colours and various shapes. I potted them up and waited…

Spring came, and one by one, so did my tulips. They were beautiful of course, but something wasn’t quite right. They didn’t give me the sense of accomplishment that I was expecting. There was something about the mix of red and white stripes, soft purple, fluffy orange and parrot-shaped red – along with all the other eclectic colours I’d gone for, that just confused me. The tulips were planted in ugly black pots, and sat on my terrace with its half-finished Italianate fountain in the centre – a dichotomy of bright, bold mismatched colours amidst grey, Pompeiian ruins.

Tulips themselves are a wonder. The way they push up from the soil and then display the most amazing pigments is of course, a joy to behold, but I think I was just adding to the chaos in my brain with this clashing, psychedelic mix. To be fair, the tulips flowers lasted longer than I expected, but once they’re done, that’s usually it – a short-lived burst of colour before shrivellation and death ensue.

Now I am doubting whether I will repeat my tulip efforts. I’m thinking like a gardener and planning ahead! The tulips will be salvaged where possible and given a chance next year, but they will not be in pots. They will pop up in random places in my flower beds, or at the edges of the lawn: candy stripes and parrotlets, bursts of frilly orange and burgundy lollipops will decorate the garden in a much more diffused fashion, and hopefully naturalise and spread as nature intended.

So that’s me done with tulip overthinking – I need to keep it simple. Less is more. But there is one plant that I had never knowingly grown before last year, when Big Seymour found himself in a garden centre all alone and brought home two ugly little dahlia tubers.

My experience of dahlias was not a positive one. When we were young, my brother and I found ourselves being dragged out of bed early on Thursdays because that was the day of the W.I. plant sale at our town hall. My mum was not a plant grower as such, but her (older) friend Iris was and Mum was roped in to driving Iris and all her floral wares (involving a lot of oasis) to the town hall as Iris could not drive. Iris was a forceful character, and thought nothing of enlisting my poor, long suffering mum to help her make £2.50 once a week by selling flowers: chrysanths (often dried, I believe) and of course, those dahlias. I hated those Thursday mornings. I hated Iris. I hated dahlias. I was a hateful kid.

But all these years later, dahlias were to enter my life afresh. We had started to create a cottage garden on a corner of our lawn and Big Seymour wanted flowers. He went and bought some lily bulbs (I am not keen on lilies myself) but thankfully, he also found himself (accidentally, I’m sure) buying those dahlias, too and these little things grew and grew and grew like Topsy and kept on thriving until about November, when the weather finally turned. All summer long, the dahlia plants churned out yellow flowers galore! Nothing could stop them! They just kept on going long after the silly lilies had given up the ghost.

My love affair with dahlias had begun, and as if by magic, or by algorithm, my phone began to tell me all about dahlias and their care. To make matters ever complicated, there was conflicting advice, and being a scientist, I decided I would carry out an experiment. Did I need to dig up my tubers in winter? Or not?

Well, as we had two, I decided to do both and to see which dahlia turned out the best, and last week, I finally got bored of waiting to see if green shoots would emerge from the flower bed, and went digging. There he was, the poor little tuber specimen, rotten and shrivelled and good only for the compost heap. Clearly, that location wasn’t good  for a dahlia to overwinter in. I would like to report that the other tuber is growing, but I cannot do so for certain as my current dahlia obsession means that I seem to have loads of sprouting tubers in the greenhouse, none of which are labelled. There is every chance that one of these is the plucky original…. I will recognise it if it ever comes to fruition, but at the moment, I cannot. I fell in love with these splendid plants so much that I have been collecting lots of the ugly little scrotey things and now I will have to find room for them all. Oh, and dig them up in the winter, if I want them to live on. But it is true what the influencers say – when you see the first green spring shoots on a dahlia tuber’s eye, it is incredibly exciting! And the nightly slug patrol that must ensue is therefore worth it.

I suppose I must thank Iris. To me, she was just a bossy old lady (imagine Liz Smith in The Royle Family), and even though she was terrifying at times, she was actually very kind to us. I’m sure Mum knew she was a good egg really, hence the W. I. taxi service, but she was demanding, unpredictable and very autocratic. And her phone calls were interminably long. Her pond was a hazardous green (hence her nickname Virus Iris), her garden was covered in hundreds of greenhouses and her kitchen had an unusual smell. But it is Iris I think of now, as I tend to my dahlias, and I wonder whether she’d be impressed. I don’t think I will be displaying my specimens at the Women’s Institute any time soon, but I have got there in the end; I am a gardener in the making.

And for that reason, I will now throw the classic gardener question out there: Are we safe from frost yet?

#living the middle aged dream

Crap pic’ from last year as  I stupidly forgot to photgraph this year’s abomination.