  From Anna Pavord's book, Bulb.
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With cooler and longer nights and the arrival of bulb catalogues, gardeners start to think about their spring planting. Now is the ideal time to plant bulbs for next season’s splendour, but there are plenty of bulbs beyond those of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.”
Anna Pavord’s new book, Bulb (Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Books USA, $50), should become the reference for both novice and experienced gardeners. Her personal guide from A to Z — acis to zigadenus — goes well beyond the traditional spring bloomers.
“Some absolutely gorgeous bulbs flower in summer and autumn, and it would be mad to do without them,” she says.
“You just need to stitch in a second bulb-planting season in spring, which will provide gladioli and lilies, eucomis and nerines. And that’s just for starters! The autumn-flowering Cyclamen hederfolium should be in any gardener’s top 10 plants. It flowers for almost three months, and the lovely marbled leaves provide excellent ground cover for another three. What more could you want?”
Readers could say the same about Pavord’s book. With its poetic foreword, alphabetical descriptions, easy-to-follow how-to sections and seasonal suggestions, Bulb is a wonderful mix of the lyrical and the practical, the beautiful and the down-and-dirty about growing bulbs.
Pavord says she wanted to give gardeners clear information but with “plenty of unexpected information” added in: “I love to know the background of flowers — where they’ve come from, how they got their names — and it adds an extra layer of interest to a garden if you understand a bit about the history of the things that are growing in it.”
A section of the book takes readers around the world and through several centuries. No dry history this, the chapter takes you to the fall of Constantinople, along the Silk Road, to the first British settlement in Virginia and on merchant ships to the Americas and Africa.
Pavord has for many years kept notes on the bulbs she grew and collected books on different types of bulbs, and she noticed that there was no single, wide-ranging reference on the subject.
“I wrote the kind of book that I would most like to have had when I first started growing these beauties,” she says. “The most difficult thing was limiting the book to about 600 bulbs, but I felt more would have made it unwieldy.”
Her notes give a personal touch to each entry. For example, part of a description of a fall snowdrop: “The flower scent of Galanthus reginae-olgae is strong and musky, powerful for so small a flower, but with too much of old sock about it to be entirely pleasing. This species was first collected on Mount Taygetus in the Greek Peloponnese, and in 1876 was named after Queen Olga of Greece, the Duke of Edinburgh’s grandmother. Give it a warmish, sunny site.”
Each entry is also accompanied by useful statistics, such as height, hardiness, blooming season and habitat.
From Anna Pavord's book, Bulb.
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Andrew Lawson’s photographs add to the sumptuous visual appeal of the book.
“Wherever the pages fell open,” Pavord says, “I wanted the reader to be stunned by the beauty of the things on the page.”
Mission accomplished. Whether you let it fall open at crocus or muscari, uvularia and veltheimia or double-page spreads of the early iris Katherine Hodgkin, tulips and narcissus Hawera, the book will draw you in through the illustrations.
Obviously, Pavord is passionate about her subject. Bulbs “zoom up, do their thing and then put themselves away until they are ready to flower again,” she says. “They don’t hang around like hybrid tea roses do, with nothing but hideous, spiked stems to offer. For most bulbs, their flower is their raison d’etre, and the complexity and beauty of that bloom is breathtaking.”
Pavord has been the gardening correspondent for England’s The Independent newspaper since 1986. She has written eight books and was a founding editor of Gardens Illustrated. She also contributes to radio and TV programs when not gardening.
She hopes Bulb will be used by readers “frequently and with pleasure. Perhaps it may lead gardeners to marvel with even greater wonder at the extraordinary riches we have at our disposal.”
Janis Wallace is a London, Ont., writer.
