Recording in the Field

Recording in the field, literally the field sometimes, is one of the best bits of this job. If I had said at the beginning of this series that I was planning an Offshoot episode on daffodils you might have expected the field below in Lincolnshire to look slightly different. But I had had a conversation with Taylors bulbs last year at a show that had left me wondering what are daffodils doing in July? I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Daffodil fields in July

The Our Plant Stories recording trip had begun the previous day in a very different field, if I had visited that one back in the eighties all I would have seen were 3 large Lime trees. Now it is home to 22 wildlife gardens! As a young woman Anne, the founder of Natural Surroundings, had set herself up with a little office above a local newsagent in Holt in Norfolk, hoping she could share her knowledge about wildlife-friendly gardening. A local landowner offered her a patch of land and she set to work growing the plants but in a series of small gardens, linked by winding paths, showing others what you can do in a small space.   It must feel as though 40 years later the rest of the world has finally caught up.  But her approach reminded me of Poppy Okotcha’s - her garden isn’t wild, she edits and encourages plants, watches where they are happy, ensuring that there is always something in bloom for pollinators.  There’s a bee garden, a moth garden, a creepy-crawly garden. She’s so knowledgeable but also so curious and that reminded me of Adam Frost’s advice to enjoying a garden - be curious.

I am very excited for this episode in September and I don’t quite want to reveal the conversation guest yet except to say that he had a big influence on Anne’s garden but that they have never met…until now! 

My second recording took me to Lincolnshire and the field in the photograph. For years I have seen Taylor’s bulbs in garden centres and supermarkets.  I have marvelled at their daffodil displays at Chelsea in May which have earned them numerous golds.  They have a royal warrant.

I’m hoping listeners will indulge me on this Offshoot episode about daffodils.  I was just curious - how long does it take to ‘grow’ a daffodil bulb that you can sell to consumers?   I realised I just pick up or order packs each year with no real understanding of how that product has reached the shelves.

Well I do now and if you are now pondering these questions then listen on Tuesday, I promise you will think twice when you pick them up in Autumn.   Standing in that field, I was looking at enormous clumps of hard earth, Ian my guide to bulb life, described the clumps as looking like asteroids.  They’re the product of a wet spring and a dry summer, some were the size of my hand, some were the size of his head! Imagine trying to harvest daffodils bulbs from that field. 

Then there’s the grading - which bulbs will go back into the earth to carry on growing, which will be packed and dispatched and what happens to those with ‘daughter bulbs’?

There is also some great advice about how to store the bulbs when you get them and how to choose them so that you can have them blooming in your garden from Jan to April.  So although it is counter intuitive to talk about daffodils in July, and you won’t find them featured in any of the garden magazines right now, I hope you will agree that if we want to be curious and really understand plants sometimes we need to focus in on them at different times in their cycle, not just when we are admiring their flowers.

And just one final bit of good news - I will be running the British Library interview with Poppy Okotcha and Adam Frost as a podcast interview in August.

Have a lovely weekend.

Sally

x