With planting bulbs now on the agenda, small blue ones should be on the shopping list.
Scillas, puschkinias, muscaris and, especially, chionodoxas brilliantly bring the spring garden to life. They're easy to grow and spread well - sometimes too well - under the right conditions. As with many bulbs, planting them in large groups makes for a bold splash of colour.
Scillas, or squills, are the quintessential spring bulbs. These little gems usually like life in the full sun but also cope well under deciduous trees and bushes, doing their bit before the leaf canopy has formed. Scilla bifolia, with rich violet flowers and dark mauve stamens, is especially striking. As with other scillas, its petals have subtle stripes or ribs, dark mauve in this case, and each stem usually boasts 12 flowers. But beware: it can't stand competition from assertive neighbours. As with all scillas, plant 8cm deep and 8cm apart.
In my book, S mischtschenkoana and S siberica Spring Beauty provide some subtle blue. Mischtschenkoana is probably the most elegant scilla, with iceberg-blue flowers and darker blue ribbing on petals. If you can't provide a sunny spot, S siberica Spring Beauty is for you. Although it only has four or five wonderfully strong bright-blue flowers per stem, it usually compensates with more than one stem per bulb. It spreads nicely in sparse grass in semi shade.
Puschkinia scilloides are, as you'd expect, similar to scillas but are a touch more sophisticated, with more wispy, delicate-looking flowers. Each stem normally produces half a dozen star-like flowers. The petals are attractively pale blue, each with a darker central stripe.
The grape hyacinth, muscari, is all too well-known, if not for the best reasons. It's a relentless spreader, controlling a bed in no time, so confine the plant to grassland where it can be left in peace. Its unsightly foliage persists for most of the year, so it's much less obtrusive in a wilder area.
If you have enough space to let it spread feely, a bulb like M armeniacum Blue Spike puts on a fine display. It's a showy double with brilliant clear blue flowers on a pyramid-shaped head.
If you buy a flowering bulb at a garden centre, you'll find the foliage is much less messy than one you'd raise yourself. Commercial growers keep grape hyacinth bulbs in cold store for several months prior to selling. When allowed to grow, the flower spikes then zoom up before the bulbs can produce their more normal messy leaves. If, after flowering, you plant out in the garden, they'll revert to type with all the untidy leaves. Plant 10cm deep and 5cm apart.
But for the perfect blue spring bulb, look no further than chionodoxa. This Glory of the Snow gets its name from the ancient Greek words chion (snow) and doxa (glory). And glorious it certainly is. Enjoy the star-shaped flowers of Chionodoxa forbesii, with its rich sky-blue petals surrounding a white eye. The flowers open upward, creating a carpet effect when planted generously.
Unsurprisingly, the 19th-century plant collector George Maw and his Greek and Turkish servants were bowled over when they first chanced upon Chionodoxa luciliae. He claimed the men became "botanically excited" when they saw great drifts growing in front of them.
If you can't lay on the drifts that Maws stumbled upon, you could enjoy chionodoxa in pots, planting 4-8cm deep and closer than the usual 4cm apart. Use a loam-based compost, mixing two parts compost to one part grit. Finish off with a grit mulch and use a potash-rich liquid feed, such as tomato or comfrey, when the bulbs are growing.
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