Every year, it’s the same: I am caught out by the violet flash of Iris reticulata and it makes my day. Being the first flowers of the year to bloom, snowdrops get a lot of hoo-ha, but irises offer a spangly cocktail dress to the Galanthus’s fey Victorian nightdress: bolder, showier and sometimes in leopard-print shoes.
From unprepossessing little bulbs – not unlike a fat, hairy clove of garlic – these miniatures arrive in the depths of nearly spring. I’ve grown them since I started experimenting with gardening on a north-facing London balcony nearly a decade ago, and they’re the one plant I’ve unfailingly grown every year since. They sum up everything I love about gardening: beauty, surprise, resilience and sweet anticipation – a dollop of wonder on an otherwise ordinary March morning.
Making magic from something small and overlooked, celebrating the quiet wonder in the natural world around us, bringing the outdoors in – this is what I’ll be writing about here, as well as offering inspiration and hard-won advice to help you grow things that make life a little more cheerful.
I am an urban gardener. I share my beloved garden (north-facing, biggish for London, good Victorian wall) with pigeons and foxes and slugs, but over the two years I’ve been growing here (since graduating from that balcony), I’ve ushered in an ecosystem of birds, spiders and earthworms by using organic practices. I make my own compost, I let the weeds grow and I avoid peat like the plague.
Early dwarf irises, then. I throw these easy bulbs into pots in autumn – from October is fine. They’re so dinky that I opt for old terracotta seedling pots, but a healthy number in a broader container works too. They can get easily lost in the flowerbed, so pots or window boxes offer maximum impact for close admiration.
Supermarkets often offer growing iris bulbs in paper pots around now, and I have descended upon them with abandon. You can also buy potted bulbs online from late winter: simply put the whole lot in a nicer bowl or pot and leave on your kitchen table. Keeping the soil slightly moist will help the flowers last longer.
In either case, noting varieties you admire elsewhere is a gift to your future self when you come to order bulbs in late summer. Chelsea Physic Garden has a spectacular theatre of irises, where the pale blue ‘Katharine Hodgkin’, with yellow on the falls (the three lower petals) caught my eye. ‘Purple Hill’ is Quality Street-coloured and sturdy while ‘Alida’ is a searing sky blue. Finally, ‘Pauline’ is usually on my list: a deep, gothic violet with white spots on the falls. They are a fabulous start to the growing year – one I’m looking forward to joining you for.
Alice Vincent is the author of Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival (Canongate, £16.99), available from guardianbookshop.com for £14.95
