Flowers

The light fantastic

19.09.11

Gardening: bulbs.

Garden centres are full of enticing bulbs, some for adding colour during the festive season and others, such as daffodils, for cheering up the cold, grey days of late winter. Some varieties should be planted soon, others in a few weeks, but either way, buy early to get the ones you want.

Narcissus papyraceous – paper-whites – grow well in pots, and being natives of the eastern Mediterranean they fare well indoors, but won’t survive a harsh winter outdoors. A new paper-white variety, Inbal, has much going for it: each stem carries a dozen white and orange, wonderfully scented flowers and may keep flowering for three or four weeks. Avalanche, with its white petals and lemon centre, is also known as 17 Sisters because of the number of sweetly scented flowers on a stem.

These varieties look good and, having shorter stalks, are less trouble. A few years ago, magazine Canadian Gardening reported that a horticulture student from Cornell University, New York, found an intriguing way of reducing stem length: “He accidentally spilled some of his alcoholic beverage into a pot of paper-whites that had just sprouted. A few weeks later, his fellow students noticed plants that had imbibed were shorter than others, even though the blooms were the same size. Four months and three trials later, the results were announced: a few drops of alcohol resulted in stalks that are 40% shorter, which means that they do not drop over.” One UK mail-order company recommends a tot of vodka for bulbs growing in special bulb vases.

Source: Herald Scotland