Spring has Sprung

You know it’s Spring when all around town, from the Grange Gardens to pots on doorsteps, tulips, first made popular by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman I, burst into flower in a cheerful rainbow of hues. It is too late to plant any for this year, but it is the perfect time to identify gaps and plan which varieties you would like to buy in the autumn. In my garden I use different colour combinations for different areas. In our herbaceous border I have gone for bold and brilliant orange and purple, ‘Ballerina’ and
‘Queen of the Night’, as seen in Virginia Woolf’s garden at Monk’s House, as well as the romantic ‘Bleu Aimable’ which fades to a dreamy blue as it opens up. For pots, I prefer something vivid and scarlet such as ‘Ile de France’, while in our front garden I have opted for pastel pink and yellow.
Once the risk of frost has passed, which is usually quite early here in Sussex, you can start thinking about planting out seedlings you have started off indoors, as well as sowing seeds direct into the ground. I attended a study day at the late Christopher Lloyd’s famous East Sussex garden at Great Dixter last year, where head gardener Fergus Garrett was asked which flowers he would choose if he could only sow three. Ladybird poppies, larkspur and the frothy white Ammi majus, or Queen Anne’s Lace, came his reply. I duly tried this combination and had success with the poppies and Ammi but lost the larkspur to slugs. If you want to give it a go, it is best to sow the Ammi and larkspur inside in modules then plant out when it is warmer. You can scatter the poppy seeds straight into soil which you have forked to a fine tilth. Don’t forget to water and protect the little seedlings – I covered them with an old fireguard – and by early summer you will have a wonderful display.
If you sowed sweet peas under cover earlier in the year, now is a good time to plant them out. If you didn’t, don’t worry, you can always buy plugs from the garden centre. The thing to remember with sweet peas is to pinch out the growing tip once they are four to eight inches high, so they become nice and bushy. As soon as the first flowers appear you must pick them every day to encourage them to keep on flowering.
We are lucky to have lots of self-sown comfrey in our garden – you will recognise it by its broad leaves and white bell-like flowers – it grows very happily in this part of the world. When the flowers start to fade, you can harvest the leaves to make Comfrey Tea. Place them in a bucket, weigh them down with stones and add water, preferably rainwater. Leave the mixture to steep for six weeks then drain off the liquid into a watering can and give your plants a nice – if smelly – cup of tea.