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Spring into autumn

Don’t enjoy your spring flowers so much that you forget that bulbs, corms and tubers have a second season, says Gunars Ulmanis.

With our gardens awash with tulips, discussing autumn-flowering bulbs may seem as incongruous as high street shops filling their windows with Christmas displays in the middle of summer. But if we want to have bulbs in flower this autumn we need to be thinking about planting them now. I became interested in ‘off-season’ bulbs, and autumn plants from corms and tubers, for two reasons. Firstly, of course, they provide a late-season flush of colour, but secondly, they are a valuable resource for late-flying insects.

Dahlia ‘Bishop’s Children’, with visting hoverfly.

Ivy-leaved cyclamen

Cyclamen hederfolium syn. C. neapolitanum is often considered a native species, but it is actually from the region bordering the Mediterranean. The confusion probably arose because this plant has long been in cultivation – from the late 16th century – and during this time has ‘escaped’ into the countryside. Like meadow saffron, the ivy-leaved cyclamen is an insect-pollinated plant, but its shuttlecock-like flowers pose quite a challenge for visiting bees. I watched a common carder bumble-bee flit from one hanging flower to another; each time it tried to grasp the throat of a bloom, the bee’s weight caused the flower to dip sharply, dislodging the poor insect as if it were an unwelcome suitor.

Ivy-leaved cyclamen C. hederfolium When pollination does occur, the fresh seeds take only around eight weeks to germinate, though the tuber has to develop for a further two to three years before it will flower. Left to their own devices, these long-lived plants – some are known to be 130 years old – will carpet large areas and are particularly useful for planting on dry slopes, or in the rooty soil under large trees.

Being hardy to -16°C (3°F), ivy-leaved cyclamen will succeed even in the coldest part of the garden, and it tolerates both sun and shade. Nevertheless, it prefers a humus-rich soil and benefits from a covering of leaf-mould each summer, when the leaves die back. Dry tubers can be planted out in July, and pot-grown ones still in leaf can be transplanted in early spring, at about 5cm (2in) depth and 20cm (8in) apart.

In the wild the flowers are often lightly perfumed, but those grown in gardens rarely have a scent. By way of compensation, however, each mature tuber can produce upwards of fifty blooms. These can be pink or white with a five-sided throat and are in flower from August onwards. In some plants the flowers develop before the leaves, while in others they come afterwards. The leaves differ greatly from one plant to another, though in general they are spearhead-shaped with silver marbling. En masse, they form effective and striking ground cover.

The capricious nature of this plant has produced numerous forms and sub-species, yet as most cyclamen species are genetically incompatible, hybridisers have found it very difficult to produce new cultivars by cross-pollination.

 

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