Gardening with Galligan: More lovely spring days

How glorious the weather has been! It’s easy to forget how beautiful spring is and for that matter how strange it would be to live without seasons. My son said when he was living in Los Angeles, that friends would call him on the phone intending to leave a message, and when he answered they would say, “What are you doing in the house on such a beautiful day?” And his feeling was, “Every day is a beautiful day, I’ll go out tomorrow, it will be just as beautiful.”

But for those of us who have had what seemed like an endless parade of gray, chill, lowering days, these feel like a free pass out of purgatory.

One of the nicer aspects of spring, between the daffodils, so well known and loved, and the coming of the tulips, sometimes called “the lipstick of the garden,” is the appearance of the lesser-known bulbs. Among these are many you should make friends with. They tend to be unusually hardy, almost always make good cut flowers and come in a variety of colors.

I would especially recommend wood hyacinths, otherwise known as hyacinthoides hispanica. These lovely loose clustered blooms, unlike their uptight cousins the hyacinths, are a great addition in the spring garden and will tolerate full sun, half sun and light shade. They grow a little more than a foot tall and come in shades of blue, pink and white. I’ll cover some more choices next week before going on to garden royalty — tulips, peonies and roses.

Trick question of the week: What is the exact proper time to figure out your bulb order for next spring?

Meaning, when do you consult your catalogs and make a list? If your answer was “right this minute,” you would be absolutely correct. Why? Because this is the time of year when you walk around and actually see everything you have to remember, come the fall. A small example: my new planting of white daffodils ends on the south side of the second step down towards the driveway. That’s important, because I want to start the next hundred where that planting ends.

You could, of course, put a marker there, but markers are notably unreliable; they get stepped on, blown away, rained out and all of the foregoing. If you make a notation, you don’t need a marker. So put down what your plans are, include the mistakes you made — and I’ve made several this spring — in your garden book.

You don’t have a garden book? After all these years I’ve been nattering on and on about how important it was to have a garden book and you paid no attention? I don’t know how to take this. But I do know what you must do. Put this paper down now! You can read it later. Stand up! Go to the car and drive to the IGA. Walk to the back where the butter and cream cheese is and turn around. See the nice little collection of books, paper, pencils and pens and other schoolroom stuff? Buy one of the books!

Any book can be your garden book, it doesn’t have to be green and beautiful with illustrations like mine. Mine only looks like that because people keep giving them to me for Christmas and although I love getting them, the IGA books are perfectly fine. Take a Magic Marker and in capital letters write “Garden Book” on the front. There! Now you have a garden book. If you have gotten out of the chair and done this, you may return to sitting and reading. Otherwise …