EARLY bulbs heralds spring, and the warmer weather brings new life in our gardens.
While bulbs are in bloom it’s the time to see if you have them where you want them or if there are gaps.
Taking photos is a good way of recording this to use later in the season to move or plant out more. Mass plantings or solid clumps repeated are great ways of creating a tapestry which changes the seasonal colours in your gardens.
Daffodils and jonquils look fabulous in swathes across lawns especially on the sides of banks and slopes; this is done to perfection at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland with masses of daffodils across the side of a steep slope. We are fortunate in the New England to have the beauty of four distinct seasons to let us enjoy the changing palette.
To make the most of this try using two colours, one in spring and another in summer and you will be amazed how much difference can be achieved. Yellow is a colour I love in early spring but don’t tend to use when the weather is warmer, perhaps this is a leftover from the very hot Mungindi summers.
Other lovely yellows with early spring blooms are yellow banksia roses, forsythias, wattles, jasmines, ranunculus, tulips and Dutch iris. You will find your golden cypress and other gold leafed plants will look more vibrant when accompanied by these early spring yellows, where as when the green reappears they tend to be mellowed down.
As you know I grow a lot of roses and therefore have a mass of colour in the garden as the weather warms up, I find blue looks fabulous with the range of colours of the roses so am always looking out for new blue flowering plants. Lobelias, felicias, salvias, agastaches, veronicas and irises all come in blues. This year I have planted my David Austin beds quite heavily with perennials as I have been having trouble with wind breaking off tall shoots at ground level. This is, of course, not a permanent problem as the trees and hedges will protect my garden once they establish. Having attended the Rare Plants Fair earlier this year, I have had lots of mail order boxes arriving with all sorts of new and exciting plants – can’t wait to see how they perform.
If you like a lot of different colours in your garden you will find separating the sections with a green border or hedge will create order and it won’t be quite as busy, established gardens have the advantage here.
