Wake up Amaryllis!

If you, like me, love to decorate your home with majestic Amaryllis flowers at Christmas time I can recommend these two beautiful little films from Zeta's Trädgård showing you how to 'awaken' the bulb before planting it...

I have always planted my Amaryllis bulbs into pots without this 'awakening' step and they have been consistently late in flowering, so a few days ago I yanked my 'Apple Blossom' bulb out of its pot, brushed off the compost and perched it on a bulb vase with the root shoots trailing in water. When these roots have perked up I will remove any withered root shoots and plant the bulb back in the pot - hopefully it will grow a bit faster this way.

Autumn Ornamented

These photos were taken at Petersham Nurseries just outside Richmond last weekend. Garden shops like this are a real feast for the eyes, and they serve tasty food too! I recommend it if you miss colour now that the days are getting shorter, greyer and darker.

Late October - And The Garden Is Still Hanging On...

Up until a few weeks ago I would receive SMS photos from my mother of the yellow roses I planted in her garden outside Oslo this summer, but Jack Frost arrived and now Mamma's garden is asleep.

Our Surrey garden, however, is still going strong. Coming originally from a much colder climate I am enchanted with all the flowers this late in the season. Dahlias, of course, are standing firm in the rain but so are my lovely white snapdragons and most of my roses.

Antirrhinum Majus 'White Giant'

 

Dahlia 'Crème de Cassis'

 

Pink Achillea - unknown variety

 

Cactus Dahlia 'Purple Gem'

 

Rosa 'Lady Of The Lake' (by David Austin)

 

Top Tip - 30% Discount at Sarah Raven

Sarah Raven is one of my favourite suppliers of plants and seeds. She has a wonderful eye for colour and composition - her website never fails to inspire.

Right now, and until the end of the week, you can get 30% off a range of plants in the Sarah Raven mid-season sale. If it wasn't for the fact that I've already had an SR delivery today I would order these white lovelies...

Agapanthus 'White Heaven'

 

Erysimum 'White Dame'

 

Anemone 'White Swan'

 

All photos by Sarah Raven

Bulbing for Spring

It's only September but this is the best time to plan your garden for spring. It can be difficult to spend time, money and effort on flowers that won't show for another 6 months, but now really is the moment to let your creative juices flow and plan a beautiful display of spring-flowering bulbs. Don't worry about all the rules, you can flaunt them if you like. Get the bulbs, keep them cool and dry until late October and then plant them. Experts say that you should dig them up after they have finished flowering and the leaves have died down, but don't let that deter you, if you plant the bulbs a bit deeper than the instructions tell you to you'll be able to plant the rest of your perennials and annuals on top of them. The bulbs will shoot their stems up between the other plants and although they might flower a week later than normal you will be able to leave them in permanently. No digging up bulbs after they have died back, just leave them in. Yes, the bulbs may reduce a bit in quantity and quality over the years, but I'm willing to accept that if it means I don't have to scrabble around digging out spent bulbs in early summer. And who has cool, dry storage space for bulbs in summer anyway? Certainly not me.

Here are the beauties which will form our spring display next year:

Photo: Crocus

Allium Globemaster. We planted these two seasons ago and their huge, huge purple pompoms are an absolute delight. I've counted at least 10 bees feasting on a pompom at a time, so as well as being gorgeous they provide lots of food for our yellow and brown-striped friends. A big plus.

Photo: HGTVGardens

Tulipa 'Queen of Night'. This is beautiful, but beware - if you plant it in the shade it will simply look like a dark blob. It needs to be in a sunny setting in order to shine. I think it looks very pretty set against silvery foliage such as lavender or a low-growing eucalyptus, which really contrast with this silky black plum colour.

Photo: internetgardener.co.uk

To add a touch of lightness I have chosen to add Tulipa 'Apricot Beauty' for next year. There is a chance that this lovely soft colour could end up being much more vibrant since the soil in our garden is very rich, but it looks so beautiful in the photos that I'm willing to take a chance.

Photo: Tuinenstruinen.org

Allium 'Atropurpureum', a souvenir from a day spent at Wisley Flower Show a few weeks ago. The colour reminds me of crushed blackcurrants... I'm quite excited about this as I love dark coloured flowers.

 

Photo: Fluwel.nl

And finally, as another touch of lightness, and in case Apricot Beauty turns out more like the orange of smoked salmon: Tulipa 'Belle Epoque'. It's a peony-flowering variety and it looks divine. I think I'll have to plant lots of this since I am already looking forward to picking an armful for a vase.

 

A word of warning: it's all too easy to spend a lot of money when you click and buy tulips online. I would suggest choosing the lowest priced option for those bulb varieties that you want a lot of and spending the big money on rarer specimens which you can use as accents or focal points here and there. I've shopped around and found that J.Parker has some of the lowest prices among the well-know internet retailers, followed by Crocus, although there are many others. Avon Bulbs has top-top notch bulbs and some really exciting varieties (take a look at their Scilla Peruviana) - they consistently win prizes at Chelsea Flower Show - but they are quite a bit more expensive. Find out which varieties you want and then see how many you can get from one supplier - what we often forget is that savings on bulbs can often be wasted on postage costs when we buy from more than one supplier.

Supermarkets also sell bulbs and sometimes they are very reasonable but you might have to put up with slightly loud colour combinations as they tend to sell mixed bags of tulips. Morrisons has a very pretty collection of 4 different white narcissi for only £2 (10 bulbs) which I think is worth trying out, and the above-mentioned 'Queen of Night', also at £2 (10 bulbs). Waitrose, which collaborates with Crocus and therefore gets a good quality selection, has a number of tasteful combinations on sale right now at decent prices. The trick with supermarket and garden centre bulbs is to buy them early, as they tend to dry out on the shelf (specialist suppliers keep their bulbs carefully at exactly the right temperature and humidity to ensure that they stay in optimum condition). Better to keep them cool and dark at home while you wait for the time to plant them out, rather than wait for them to go on sale in late November (Something I know all about as I'm a shark when it comes to picking up items at knock-down prices. I've invariably found that at least 30% of sale bulbs don't perform, so it's not actually a saving).

Mikaela Willers - a Formex favourite

I spent a whole day visiting Stockholm's Formex trade show last week, and among the many many fantastic exhibitors my favourite was one that my advance radar had somehow missed: Mikaela Willers' ceramics.

 Photo: mikaelawillers.se

Walking past the stand I was instantly drawn to the beautiful colours and shapes of Mikaela's range of urns, pots, candlesticks and tableware. Wow, I thought, I want everything here! Mikaela herself was glamorous and charming and very happy to chat about her craft.

 

My particular favourite in the range is a scented candle in a small bowl which can be used for keeping small pieces of jewellery, or table salt, or any number of things once the candle is finished.

 'Pistill' bowl with scented candle. Photo: mikaelawillers.se

'Pistill' bowl. Photo: via Pinterest

New from Iittala - 'Ruutu'

Finnish home and tableware brand Iittala keep launching beautiful new designs. Next up is a new collection of vases to be launched early next year. 'Ruutu' is the name, which means 'square' in Finnish, and they are beautifully square and simple. Like couloured glass cubes. Anyone who already has an Iittala vase (and most Nordics probably do) will know how versatile they are. 'Ruutu', as you can see from the pictures, can stand alone or in a group - and preferably in a setting where light can filter through the glass.

The 'Ruutu' vases have been designed by the French fraternal duo Erwan & Ronan Bouroullec, and are handmade by Iittala's craftsmen in Finland. Each vase takes 24 hours work to finish. A true artisan piece of glass art for the home, in other words.

Iittala doesn't have an online shop, but their website lists retailers in the UK - and personally I tend to go to Skandium in London when I want anything from their collections. I find Skandium's light Nordic environment very soothing. If you cannot make it to Skandium they have a very good online shop.

Skultuna

I have coveted the brass plant pots by Swedish brand Skultuna for some time now, and I finally decided to buy one for myself as a birthday present last month. I opted for the brushed finish, which is luminous in a subtle way and goes well with my deliberately tarnished (yes, deliberately - not because I can't be bothered to polish!) 70's brass side tables either side of our sofa. It lights up a corner of our sitting room now that the evenings have become so much darker. It is larger than I expected, the medium size which I selected would suit a decent-sized pot plant (therefore, if one wasn't up to spending too much money one could perfectly well chose the small size, which would fit most indoor plants I should think).

One of the reasons why I had delayed in aquiring one of these gleaming pots was simply that I didn't know where to buy one here in the UK. Until I discovered an online shop called Royal Designs which sells a very good selection of Nordic designs. I think this could become slightly dangerous, as there were so many things on their site that I wanted... In any case, they were very efficient, my parcel arrived less than a week later and postage (it came all the way from Sweden) was very reasonable.