All this rain agrees with late-season-flowering bulbs, writes Jane Powers
Blazing hot crocosmia, jingling-in-the- wind dierama and perfectly sculpted Watsonia pillansii: these are some of my favourite summer flowers. Most gardeners know them well. Crocosmias include the orange montbretia that lines the roads in the southwest of the country. Dierama - with its pendulous pink bells, attached by wire-thin threads to springy, arched stems - is commonly known as wand flower or angel's fishing rod, and is sometimes, appropriately enough, seen leaning over garden ponds. The watsonia is pretty and well made, with spires of neatly arranged, waxy salmon-pink flowers.
The trio are all from South Africa, and all have swollen underground storage organs, which means they can be classed as bulbs. A bulb is the equivalent of a full larder for a plant, containing everything it needs for the first few weeks after it wakes up at the start of the growing season. Both nutrition and embryonic buds are packed within, meaning that flowering can take place immediately - without the roots and leaves having to go foraging for food or manufacturing it from the sun.
The three plants are actually corms, but the term bulb is a useful horticultural idiom that covers true bulbs, such as tulips and daffodils, as well as corms, rhizomes and tubers - although, come to think of it, no one ever classed our most popular tuber, the potato, as a bulb. (Stay with me: the purpose of all this bulb talk will become apparent in a minute.)
The bulbous South African trio that started this train of thought have all done well in this crazy, wetter-than-ever summer - at least in my garden. Although the rain has been biblical and worse, my normally parched town soil is in seventh heaven. The Mediterranean conditions that are supposed to happen with climate change - drier summers and wetter winters - and that occur naturally along our part of the Dublin coast (at least in summer) have been turned upside down. This means that our garden, which has been accustomed to being climatically situated on the Med, has now, it seems, moved to South Africa. Which makes gardening interesting, to say the least.
It has moved not to the usual spot visited by the Irish, the Cape Town area (which really does enjoy a Mediterranean climate), but to somewhere east of that: Eastern Cape province and the Drakensberg Mountains of KwaZulu-Natal, perhaps. In these regions, summers are wet and winters are cool and dry. The rainy season occurs during December, January and February (summer in Africa). There may be daily thunderstorms, and at times it pours cats and dogs for days at a time. (Sound familiar?)
All this rain - no matter whether it's east of Johannesburg or south of Dublin city - agrees with late-summer-flowering bulbs. Such plants (our South African threesome, for instance) come to life in spring, and do their growing over the summer - which is why our recent wet and woeful weather suits them down to the ground. Then, the bulbs - fat, happy and contented after the moist growing season - become dormant in winter and sleep through the cold months, holding deep within them the material for next year's flowering.
Just for comparison, spring bulbs, such as bluebells and snowdrops, wake up in autumn, grow during the damp winter and spring months, and go into dormancy in summer. Either way, a bulb (or corm, rhizome or tuber) allows a plant to wait out a period of climatic stress - that is, drought and cold, or drought and heat - depending on whether it's a summer grower or a winter grower.
There now, I've finished with the technical talk - but I thought you might want to know why our nasty wet summer has been perfect for beauteous, summer-growing South African bulbs.
There are many such gems that flower after midsummer, all with clean and bright, candy-coloured and well-shaped flowers. Schizostylis coccinea, from the Drakensberg Mountains, has flat, starry blooms of saturated red. It flowers from late summer until late autumn (and even into winter, when it is mild). There are pink forms in cultivation, including the Irish 'Mrs Hegarty', which first appeared in Blanche Hegarty's garden in Clonbur, Co Galway, around the beginning of the 20th century. Schizostylis is a dreadful mouthful, but the common name, Kaffir lily, contains a racial slur - something of which older gardeners, who insist on using this appellation, seem blithely unaware. It is, not to mince words, the same as calling it a nigger lily. In South Africa it is now known as the river lily, but that hasn't caught on with the old colonial types over here.
The Agapanthus genus, also known as African lily, is one of the few late-summer-flowering South Africans that has species that can cope with summer drought. The big evergreen one (A praecox and its subspecies), which is often grown in pots, thrives on neglect. In my own garden a large clump has remained undivided, unfed and largely ignored for more than 20 years - except by the dogs that dig under it and the hens and snails that nest in it. Yet it faithfully produces a fine crop of huge, azure-blue umbels every August. Evergreen agapanthus are a little tender, and may succumb to frost in the coldest of Irish gardens. The deciduous kinds, of which there are hundreds (they are fiercely promiscuous), are more frost resistant.
Another South African with pretty umbels, this time of delicate lilac flowers, is Tulbaghia violacea, which enjoys the curious name of society garlic. Its grey-green, strap-shaped leaves smell strongly of garlic, and the flowers are lightly fragrant. If you like variegated plants, try the cultivar 'Silver Lace', which has striped leaves.
Two of the tiniest South African bulbous plants (both are corms, as a matter of fact) are Rhodohypoxis baurii and Anomatheca laxa. The first bears white, pink or cerise flat-faced flowers that hug the ground, and are probably best grown in an alpine bed or in pots (where they must be watered regularly during the growing season). The second puts out dainty scarlet flowers with wine-coloured markings, on 10cm wiry stems. A white form, with red markings, is also quite common. When Anomatheca has finished flowering, its shiny red seeds (like microscopic cherries) can be collected and dropped into suitable sunny spots in the garden - unwalked-on gravel is perfect. There they will produce more of the same - little starry surprises at your feet.