The resurgence of growth in the April garden is magnificent. But as welcome as spring bulbs are, they can make for a patchy looking landscape.

Gardening experts talk a lot about planting combinations, and I have come to appreciate the importance of using plants together, especially spring bulbs with something more weighty like perennials and shrubs. If you’re an old pro, none of these combinations will be new to you, but for newer gardeners, here are a few spring planting combinations worth trying:

Pulsatilla vulgaris and vinca minor: The fantastically fuzzy buds of pulsatilla are marvelous in late March and early April. The out-of-focus blue in the background is the ground-hugging vinca minor: this periwinkle is much easier to manage in a garden than its big brother, the greater periwinkle vinca major. Some gardeners will warn you away from any periwinkle as too invasive, but this is quite manageable in my garden and flowers profusely in April if I cut it back hard in autumn.

Osmanthus delvayii above plain and parrot tulips:This very slow growing shrub is a froth of white for a few weeks in April, and the way it spreads its arms over the tulips reminds me of a tiny flowering cherry tree. Its heavenly, lily of the valley-like scent is fresh and clean, never overpowering. Not to be confused with Osmanthus burkwoodii, which has bigger leaves and smells like toilet duck. The tulips shown here are purple Passionale and the orange parrot, Professor Rontgen, but any pair of contrasting colours would look good.

Emerging roses above fritillaria meleagris: The snakes head fritillary picks up the red tones in the emerging foliage of many roses: here it’s the Portland rose, Rose de Rescht. So many emerging perennials offer wonderful foliage which looks great
next to bulbs and can help disguise their dying leaves. Try to plant the snakeshead where you will see the sun coming through it, so it lights up like an elaborate checked lampshade: otherwise it can look like a dirty purple. I like the white version of the snakeshead even better, and it’s fairly easy to grow from seed; if you can wait a few years they’ll reach flowering size and you can fill a corner of your garden with these elegant little bulbs.

Grape hyacinths with aubretia: Someone else mentioned this combination and I’m so glad I tried it. The muscari hold their heads above the aubretia, which is that fabulous rockery plant that spills its purpleish flowers over stone walls. “We should get more of that,” was my husband’s one and only comment about the aubretia last year. He doesn’t usually say much, so that means something. If you don’t want to find the grape hyacinth appearing all over your garden, snip off the flower heads before they go to seed.

Hyacinth with wild violet, aubretia and vinca minor: I’m not a great fan of monochrome schemes, but this one sowed itself and was winking at me from the border as I was thinking about this blog post, so I had to mention it. I recall wanting an all-blue border at a certain stage in my gardening life, but I got over it.

What I won’t show you today is a picture of my raised bed, which has eight lovely broad bean plants and eight plastic milk bottles (these bottles are God’s gift to the vegetable gardener who needs a cloche or drip tray. I also plant a punctured or bottomless milk bottle next to new shrubs, to give them a good 2-litre drink when I water.) This time, the bottles are covering baby beets and lettuce.

This is why I was saying last year that I wanted to keep my new vegetable patch in a bit of the garden I don’t see from the window: I hate the plastic, fleece, netting and so forth that vegetable growing so often demands. But I’d like my seedlings to survive, so I’ve rolled out the plastic.

Like the hosta halos and wire plant supports that have now disappeared beneath the delphinium foliage, the cloches won’t be eyesores for long; they should be unnecessary in a few weeks, when the frost danger has passed.

What are your favourite planting combinations in your garden? I’d love some more ideas.

SUBSCRIBE via email to future blog posts from The Stopwatch Gardener

Tell me something more exhilarating than growing from seed. I’ll bet you can’t. Drop a hard little fleck onto a fertile bed of damp compost, and just days later feel a gasp in your throat when the seed leaves push their shoulders up into the light. At the moment I’m looking at the purple-streaked leaves of baby baby beets, hairlike shoots of spring onions and round carrots, the fleshy heads of robust wild lupines, and the minute green specks of teensy alpine strawberries.

A number of the experts on some of the US gardening podcasts I listen to have been saying recently that they prefer to buy “starts” (young plants) for some of their gardening. And compared to buying a broad bean seed packet I’ll never use up this year, maybe six broad bean plants would save money. It would certainly save time. But give me seeds any day. In gardening I’m all about the miracle, less about the practical.

The real world presses in on me, as I’m sure it does on you: this week alone offered me a big dose of unloveliness, including one vomiting bug (mine), then another one (my son’s), the imminent loss of a client (government cutbacks) and the likely sale of the house I grew up in — all against a mustn’t-grumble backdrop of guilt as images of tsunami, war and death scrolled across the TV.

I need my gardening to be as absorbing and as miraculous as possible if it’s to be an adequate salve against the real world. Those seed trays may give me beets in June. But right now I see a windowsill full of hope, and that’s the food I need.

Have you seen the 2011 season of Gardeners World, just aired? I know it’s easier to sit behind a keyboard and critique than get behind a camera and make it, but here’s what I would’ve done differently (and what they may still have in store for the coming season, who knows?):

Monty and someone else in his own garden — how much chemistry can one man have with his buxus? Let’s see some kind of occasional assistant working alongside Monty in his lovely garden (and why not call Monty’s garden Ivington, since that’s what it’s really called, viz The Ivington Diaries? The makey-uppy Longmeadow name is not keeping it real — a bad start when the new GW needs to build trust. Monty has since tweeted that Longmeadow is the old name of the garden…I think that needs saying on air)

Joe Swift at his best — What did you think of Rachel de Thame and Joe Swift being sent off around the country as jobbing gardeners in otherwise immaculate NGS Gardens? Feels too low-level for these skilled folk. This idea is a boring bit they’ve lifted from the otherwise quite watchable Open Gardens show (where candidate gardens compete to make it into the National Gardens Scheme’s Yellow Book, which lists gardens that open for charity). The idea feels awkwardly pasted into Gardeners World as busy work for Rachel and Joe. I’d love to see Joe designing, maybe in urban spaces. In my opinion he excels at it, and I want to see more of it.

Bring back Alys Fowler — I was racking my brains Saturday night thinking how GW could have kept Alys and made better use of her on the show. Doing urban gardens with Joe Swift would have been a no-brainer. A visit to my local Dobbies showed a vast section of seeds devoted just to the urban gardener, as well as balcony boxes and other small-space accoutrements. Can anyone doubt that urban gardening is a massive upwards trend? Alys’s credentials speak for themselves in that area, and Joe would be a perfect partner. As it is, both Alys and Toby Buckland are the babies sitting in a puddle of bathwater on the kerb. Mistake.

A woman in her garden — Rachel de Thame is beautiful, but I’m tired of hearing that her looks are the only reason she’s back on air. She’s a knowledgeable writer, gardener and broadcaster and just a couple years ago she took on her dream patch in the country. Why aren’t we seeing Rachel in her own garden, designing that young space? If you want to be a sexist pig about it, it would provide plenty of opportunity for shirtsleeves and ogling. But if instead, like me, you identify with young mothers who struggle to find time for children, work and the garden, Rachel in her own space would strike the perfect note, shirtsleeves or no.

Carol and more Carol — I loved the BBC red button coverage of Chelsea Flower Show a couple years ago, where Carol Klein just roamed about and wowed over the plants. It’s good that Gardeners World now has her visiting open gardens; hopefully it’ll provide plenty of opportunity for her to talk about plants with fellow experts. But wouldn’t it be good to also see Carol working alongside Rachel in Rachel’s garden, as some kind of learned-oracle presence? Carol is too established to be an assistant, but she could be an advisor, and the partnership would offer a lovely older/younger woman dynamic that I bet millions would relate to — including Carol, who often speaks of her own time gardening with her late mother.

It’s absolutely right that Gardeners World is centered around a stunning garden, a strong personality and skilled gardener with vision, passion and knowledge to share, like Monty Don. But how many gardeners out there have Monty-scale dilemmas (“what shall I do with my vast acreage and mature pleached limes?”) Sure, have Monty’s garden as the standard to which we can aspire, but use the rest of the show to strike notes which really resonate with the people filling their trolleys at the garden centre, online and off-line.

Speaking of online: Attn gardeners world producer Gill Tierney, why not take a leaf out of the book of Later with Jools Holland and display a twitter hashtag at the start of Gardeners World – can I suggest #BBCGW? You might be surprised who’s watching and tweeting. You were quick enough to broadcast an e-mail address where viewers can send in gardening dilemmas that may be featured on the show. (How many days will it take the intern to go through that inbox?) Instead of just inviting work for themselves, why doesn’t the GW production team use technology to take the temperature of the twittersphere, and eavesdrop on what people really think of GW?

I’ll be watching GW, but if they want to win more hearts and minds than just mine, they’ll have to dig a little deeper.

If you hunger for good gardening podcasts as much as I do, you know they’re hard to find. Here’s my list of favourites, from the unmissable at number one to the merely OK at number eight. I’ve given the web address of the feed; I hope this will let you track down the show and subscribe to it with whatever podcast tool you use. I use Google Listen on an Android phone, and I’ve created a folder in Google Reader called “Listen Subscriptions” that lets me add any new podcast if I know its Web address.

I know that all sounds a bit technical. If you have any questions, let me know, and I’ll try to help you.

1. Gardeners’ Corner with Cherrie McIlwaine
   Feed URL: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/northernireland/garden/rss.xml
   My all-time favourite. Host Cherrie is a true radio talent, painting evocative pictures of the gardens she visits, making everything sound magical and intriguing. It’s the one podcast I really miss if it’s not available immediately after its usual Saturday recording date. The show, broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster in Northern Ireland, has also hit on the perfect mix of phone-ins, visits to stunning gardens, chats with experts, road shows, and on-site help with listeners’ gardens. About 22 minutes per episode.
2. The Greendays Gardening Panel with Steve Scher
   Feed url: http://www.kuow.org/rss.php?program=garden
   KUOW radio in Seattle has put together an excellent Tuesday gardening panel which takes questions by telephone and from its Facebook page, hosted by Steve Scher with advice from Willie Galloway (perky veg expert), Greg Rabourn (conservationist and tree guy) and Marty Wingate (the one who uses Latin plant names). I love their no-nonsense approach and the satisfying 50-minute format, and their knowledge about what works in the Pacific Northwest and their willingness to share it is evident. I wish they’d use more Latin names; I once spent a half an hour googling for the ground cover plant “kinnickkinnick” (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi).
3. Gardening with Tim and Joe – Tim Crowther and Joe Maiden
   Feed URL: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/leeds/gwtj/rss.xml
   This folksy advice show from BBC Radio Leeds is notable for its insights on growing fruit and vegetables, as well as routine care of garden plants like roses, chrysanthemums and more. I like the “back to basics” feature, and gardener Joe Maiden’s decades of experience shine through, although I wish he wouldn’t call every plant of the week “absolutely fantastic”. Short and sweet, just 12 minutes per episode.
4. A Way To Garden with Margaret Roach
   Feed URL: http://am1020whdd.com/rss/individual.php?id=119&title=A%20WAY%20TO%20GARDEN%20WITH%20MARGARET%20ROACH
   This US gardening luminary writes the “A Way to Garden” blog and has just published a new book, “And I shall have some peace there,” about the New York garden she commuted to for two decades and now lives in permanently. Host Jill could do with sounding more in charge, but I like Margaret’s insights on seed sowing, managing a mature garden, and why going organic is worth it. About 20 minutes per episode.
5. Gardeners’ Question Time with Eric Robson or Peter Gibbs
   Feed URL: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/gqt/rss.xml
   This weekly BBC radio broadcast is a must-listen for the range of unrehearsed questions the experts can answer, and although I like Peter Gibbs, I wince at episodes hosted by Eric Robson, who manages to be jolly and disdainful in the same breath. The conflicting and/or bad advice given by the expert panel can become wearing (why did they just advise listeners not to bother doing a big tidy up of last season’s fallen rose leaves? David Austin experts told me the February clean-up is a golden rule for preventing ills like blackspot, and I believe them.) I do appreciate many of the insights from panellists like Bob Flowerdew and pest expert Pippa Greenwood, despite her recent broad slur against gardening blogs. About 50 minutes per episode.
6. HearSay with Cathy Lewis and Jim Orband
   Feed URL: http://www.whro.org/home/html/podcasts/hearsay/podcast.xml
   This podcast from Virginia would be much higher up the list if it were more frequent, but Jim Orband only joins Cathy once a month, and their chat doesn’t have its own feed, so you need to keep an eye on the episodes and download the ones with Jim. He takes phone-in questions from listeners, and his willingness to share knowledge (and gardeners’ hunger to learn) is wonderful to behold — listen and marvel as he gives out his e-mail address for people to send in extra questions. I do like the banter between Cathy and Jim; she’s a truly likable host.
7. North Country Public Radio – Cooperative Extension horticulturist Amy Ivy talks to Todd Moe
   Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopStoriesFromNCPR
   Amy’s interviews with Todd are too new to me to rank higher on the list, and like the Cathy Lewis podcast, this is another one that doesn’t break out its gardening into a separate feed. But I’m now watching out every Monday for Amy’s segment, which gives practical, seasonal advice I appreciate. About 10 minutes per show.
8. Dean of Green
   Feed URL: http://www.wglt.org/podcasts/Dean_of_Green.xml
   Sultry-voiced Laura Kennedy speaks to Don Schmidt of the Illinois State University School of Biological Sciences. Laura’s incessant station identification (WGLT) is irritating, but Don Schmidt is incredibly knowledgeable and his enthusiasm is infectious. I’ve picked up a few useful tips on everything from moving peonies to the biological inner workings of plants. Super short, only about seven minutes per episode. Don takes questions from anyone, anywhere, just submit yours online at — yes, you guessed it — WGLT.org.

Attention broadcasters and bloggers – we want more, quality gardening podcasts. Why has the Scotland’s Gardens podcast has gone off air? And someone tell me why the otherwise useful and veg-centric UK online gardening community GardenersClick.com has made its GC podcast unsubscribable-to. (You can only listen to it within the walled garden of GardenersClick. Must do better, GardenersClick.) There must be hundreds of thousands of gardeners out there who, like me, would love to listen more and learn more, and would certainly be disposed to remember the names of sponsors who back such podcasts.

Do you know any other good gardening podcasts I could listen to? Do tell.

My New Year’s resolution to sit in the garden more has been on my mind constantly, and I’ve finally resolved to get a garden designer in to help me make the best of the tiny courtyard space by the backdoor.

I knew it would be difficult to get my husband to go along with this expense. So I made a list: why pay for garden design? After all, it will just be an idea on paper, with much more expense to follow if the builders execute the plan, so I figured I’d better have my rationale clear in my own mind. As it happened, he ended up agreeing even before I’d read him the list, but it was a useful exercise anyway — here are my top reasons:

1. Inviting spaces will bring us outside: as family we’re so much more likely to use the garden if there’s a welcoming place to eat and rest out there. At the moment the kids run about outside and I work on the garden, but we never just chill. I want that, and the kitchen courtyard is the perfect place.
2. A tiny space needs big thinking: this is a hard-working area that needs to cater for hanging laundry, feel cozy but not claustrophobic, look good from above and from the kitchen window in all weathers. And that’s not even talking about the planting, which should be peaceful, fragrant, and ideally incorporate a way to drown out road noise. I couldn’t get my head round it myself and finally realized that a professional eye with small-site experience is critical for this space.



3. Outside lunches for two: in good weather I try to lure my husband outdoors at lunch, but too much sun, or too little, or the general discomfort of the seating, or bug attacks mean he’ll often give up and duck back inside. A really livable outside dining space can let us enjoy our soup and sandwich and crossword while the kids are at school, and the world is on hold for an hour.
   
4. Pave the way for later: Our kids are tiny and mostly play with friends inside now, but they’ll want more privacy as they get older. When I was growing up my friends never hung out at my house, and I want it to be different for our kids. I’d like them to keep bringing their friends over, and an outside kickback space will make that more likely.
5. Lack of design could cost more: If I didn’t get a designer’s help with this space, chances are I’d push ahead with something of my own devising — a bit of new seating, some slabs, a pergola of some kind. Would it work? If it didn’t, would I keep trying, and keep spending? Probably. If we plan to stay in this house, let’s get it right first time. I can stick to the essential purchases for the next long while (manure, bone meal, potting compost), and swap, divide or grow from seed if I want more plants.

Would you ever get a garden designer to help you with part of your space? If you’ve used a designer, what was the experience like?