The gardener’s bittersweet acceptance

We may not be able to stick around long enough to enjoy the fruit of our labours.

Photo by Charlie Hopkinson / Millennium images

The box arrived from Peter Nyssen a couple of weeks ago, the same as it does every year. It is the perfect size for my toddler to be pushed around in – if I were to open it, which I won’t for a good while yet.

Somewhere out there is a gardener who opens their bulb delivery as soon as it lands, but I don’t personally know of any. In recent years I’ve just about squeaked my annual selection (a smattering of narcissus and tulips, largely in soft white, peach and pale pink tones – I save all my romantic aestheticism for spring in the garden) into the ground by New Year’s Eve. Even now I hold firm to a lesson a far more experienced gardener taught me when I was a novice giving my Sunday mornings to the local community plot: “Better in the ground than in the box.” It was January; by May those beds were filled with jewel-toned tulips.

And so for now the box will sit by the back door, having made the admirable move from the front door and down a flight of steps. I suspect I may open it by December if I’m feeling particularly active. Recently I’ve started to make space for the bulbs themselves – getting a handle on the wayward hardy geraniums that I let rampage merrily across the beds, and discovering all manner of plants I’d forgotten underneath in the process. I lifted and divided them, along with the Tellima grandiflora, to fill in the gaps of earth left behind, all while wistfully fantasising about the seasons when the garden mostly looks after itself.

But perhaps this year the reluctance to plant bulbs lies a little deeper than mere idleness. We are outgrowing our home, and soon we will have to find a new one. I have been aware of this for long enough to think about the garden in terms of how many seasons I will be able to bear witness to it, to have a cup of tea or do some gardening in it. Was the past summer our last one in the garden? Will we have another yet? So much of what I have planted is only just getting going: increasingly I think about the garden as something I have made that is only partially formed; that I will never be able to see it achieve its full beauty.

This is, of course, a problem (and a gift) innate to gardening and gardeners. It is near-impossible to place an order for something, let alone plant it, without envisaging it fully grown. Sometimes my imagination and expectations are so overblown that it is difficult not to feel underwhelmed by the fledgling being in a two-litre pot that arrives on the doorstep. We plant with all anticipation and no certainty; the land is something that we only ever borrow, ours only in the form of custodianship. We get to plant the tree or the daffodil. If we’re lucky, we get to see it flourish, too.

And so I’m dallying between planting the bulbs in pots (showier displays, portable, can be taken with us if we end up moving sooner than expected) or placing them in the ground, where there’s a risk they flower for someone else entirely – a person who would have the right to tear up the lawn I’ve begrudgingly seeded over the past couple of years and replace it with plastic grass, or to believe the Meconopsis cambrica that hailed from my childhood garden to be weeds to be removed.

I suspect the bulbs will end up in the beds; I can’t be bothered to mess around with all the perennial stalwarts in the tubs, and there’s nothing quite like the interplay of Narcissus poeticus var recurvus (pheasant’s eye), blousy pink tulips and the shower of tiny bells offered by the Tellima. Harder for the squirrels to get at, too. Perhaps, in another garden not very far away, someone else is going through the same ritual: planting bulbs with all anticipation and very little certainty, for another gardener to one day look after – and that gardener will be me.