Trees as bulb companions
Mary Sue Ittner (Wed, 07 Jul 2004 07:54:16 PDT)

Dear All,

All of this talk of trees as companions and providing assistance to bulb
planted in the garden reminds me of 3 private gardens I was lucky enough to
visit that used this concept to advantage. The first was the garden of Sir
Peter Smithers in the Italian part of Switzerland. In his book, The
Adventures of a Gardener, he describes his philosophy of gardening that you
are creating an ecosystem that supports itself over time so that as you get
older the work gets less. (Now why can't I remember that which I recognized
as a great idea!) He has planted many bulbs around deciduous trees (lots of
Magnolias for one thing as I remember.) They grow and flower and then the
trees leaf out and provide shade and interest during the summer as the
bulbs are drying up and going dormant.

The second was probably the most dramatic and one I will never forget even
though I only spent a couple of hours there. This was the small garden of
Gary Buckley, created when he lived in Victoria, Australia. He had moved
there from Tasmania where the climate was much more moderate and the summer
heat was not kind to the plants he loved. So he dug out his whole garden
down to the pipes and replaced all the soil with his special bulb mix. Then
he planted some fifty plus
weeping advanced alders, cherries, elms, birches and beeches in a winning
attempt to create a micro climate, which worked. Beneath them he planted
cyclamen, small iridaceae, smallish amaryllidaceae, and other things he
liked. The day we visited in October 1998 some of the things he had in
bloom or just finishing (I'll just do genus to save space): cyclamen,
anemone, trillium, polygonatum, rhodohypoxis, aristea, orthosanthus,
tulbaghia, diplarrena, hippeastrum, allium, arisaema, oxalis, clivia,
moraea, ipheion, sauromatus, leucocoryne, ornithogalum, sprekelia,
tritonia, iris, wachendorfia, melasphaerula, lachenalia, dicentra, scilla.
There were non geophytes too, but you get the picture. The one drawback to
his plan (at least it seemed a big one to me in these days when water seems
to be a commodity in short supply) was that his garden needed copious
amounts of water in summer when his trees were in growth. He sometimes hand
watered twice a day. Still, he made up for that in not having a lot of pots
to tend to.

The last example is Wayne Roderick's garden in Northern California. After
moving to live in the redwoods and seeing the perennials I brought with me
decrease every year and stop flowering, I overheard Wayne talking about the
way to survive living with redwoods, plant bulbs. Most of Wayne's bulbs,
like Gary's and Sir Peter's were in the ground. Wayne had planted many of
his in raised beds, but over time I am sure they (like Gary is Hawaii's
vegetable bed) were a mass of redwood roots. Redwoods are not deciduous,
but they certainly have the root action to extend to reach any moisture to
30 ft (abt. 100 meters) away. Wayne boasted that he had bulbs blooming in
his garden year round without having to water.

Mary Sue