It’s not happened yet, but I can feel that the bulb lust will soon be upon me. I work my tiny garden intensively and only manage to get four season colour into the border by packing in bulbs among herbaceous perennials. It’s probably inconceivable for me to stuff any more tulips into the hall border near my office window, but for May through August interest, I’m planning for more alliums, more lilies and possibly my first camassias next year. I saw @lialeendertz ‘s piece in the Guardian about alliums and it underscores the most useful thing you’ll ever want to know about ornamental onions: if you don’t hide their tattered leaves with something, you’ll be sorry. I’ve just tucked mine in among astrantia, nepeta and delphiniums and I’m hoping for the best.

So yes, I’m renewing my commitment to summer flowering bulbs to squeeze maximum colour from my small space, but it’s the late winter and early spring flowering snowdrops, crocus, chionodoxa, narcissus and most of all tulips that cast the real spell over me — and my budget — every autumn.

Do you remember how the Catholic church got into a good bit of trouble some centuries ago for selling indulgences, advance absolution for future sins? Hell was big back then, and folks terrified of dying with unconfessed sins on their conscience paid big sums for indulgences, hoping to guarantee life after death by ensuring they’d die “clean”…or so the reasoning went. Spring flowering bulbs are a bit like indulgences: against reason, gardeners faced with the dying of the light invest too much every autumn, trying to guarantee life for their borders on the far side of winter’s chasm. For me, planting spring bulbs — especially those chestnut brown tulips, fat and perfect — is like casting a rope to the other side of January, where my friendly bulb vendor secures it and talks me across with comforting words about “brave crocus” and tulips “like a Dutch still life”. I can resist the crocus (they may be brave, but they get battered by day two), but the tulips will always have a hold on me.

Actually, my bulb vendor is very friendly; Anne and Jack Barnard at Rose Cottage Plants have never sent me tulips that failed to dazzle or, God forbid, were wrongly labeled, an experience I’ve had many times with other mail-order companies. The blackcurrant tinted late purple parrot “Muriel” they recommended last year was indeed stunning, and this year they’ve sourced “Happy Generation” for me, one of the many I saw in my Keukenhof tour this past April, but not usually available from Rose Cottage Plants, as Anne says her customers often avoid bi-coloured tulips. I’ve ordered 30; who knows where I’ll put them, but maybe in pots at the gate.

If you’re trying to decide what tulips are worth buying, definitely ask your vendor, or see these two video tours of the Keukenhof tulip tents I made earlier this year. My voiceover rambles a bit, but you will get a sense of how many beautiful tulip varieties look, rather than relying on the hyperbolic catalog descriptions. You can also see still shots of the tulips and other parts of Keukenhof in my Flickr set.

I have scattered galanthus nivalis, a February flowering double snowdrop, among my hall border and would love to plant a short, black centred perennial like Rudbeckia, whose black eyes might hold on through the snowy months to give me a black-and-white effect in late winter. Any ideas? Rudbeckia “Goldsturm” looks good but seems a bit too tall.

Do you have a bulb addiction? Which tulips mean the most to you, and can you get away without lifting them annually?

Been thinking about whether the Web is going to kill glossy gardening magazines? No? Phil and James and lots of other people have been. But from the looks of the latest Web efforts by the UK’s aspirational Gardens Illustrated magazine, the glossies won’t go down without a fight. A bit of digging this morning turned up the following interesting facts about GI‘s shiny new web self:

1. Looks nice and it didn’t take long: According to Editor Juliet Roberts, the relaunched site took only four weeks to turn around; granted it has the BBC magazines online team behind it, but still, that’s reassuringly fast.
2. The magazine’s bloggers want your views: Although not enabled at launch last week, the site’s “Add a comment” feature went live today and, if you’ve seen this magazine in the past, you’ll know that this is a step change for a premium glossy where readers’ voices were previously confined to Letters. Roberts and Deputy Editor Sorrell Everton are already blogging about shows, design and other issues, and are looking for your reaction. Go forth and comment, ye bloggers.
3. Breaking down the garden walls: If you find Gardens Illustrated stand-offishly highbrow, the editorial team wants to change your mind. “It’s unfortunate that Gardens Illustrated has been seen as unapproachable — as editor I would like to change that,” Roberts said. “I believe we can still deliver the very best, top-notch content and take a more sharing approach with readers. I’ve been working hard to make the magazine more accessible and the new site is edging us further towards that.” On the cards are GI on Twitter, additional podcasts and more chances for readers to contribute content, including potentially users’ own garden images and a discussion forum.
4. Web exclusives are a feature: Roberts says the site isn’t just a repurposing of print material; Web exclusives will feature in Garden Visits, Plants and other areas. The publication seems to grasp that online readers don’t just want a re-hash of print content anyway.
5. The US market is in their sights: International gardeners already revelling in the atmospheric Britishness of UK exports like David Austin Roses will be interested to hear that Gardens Illustrated is aiming squarely at global markets, the US in particular. Traditional marketing to those geographies is prohibitively expensive and like other resource-strapped BBC titles, GI will do what it can to use online to reach out to new audiences.

With other parts of the BBC web presence facing as much as 25 percent cuts in staff and talk of reducing its web activity, guarding against a potential money pit is a key priority for GI, which is run by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the Beeb. “A number of magazines were very gung-ho about their websites and these have become great big black holes that people are wheel-barrowing money down,” Roberts said. “We’re going slow and cutting our cloth accordingly.”

How do you think Gardens Illustrated should include readers more in its online activities? Go on, I know you’ve got ideas.

Because I’ve spent most of my journalism career writing about technology before Stopwatch Gardener, I’ve been fascinated to see how garden writers and publishers are using tech tools to support their work. If you’re a garden writer who’s already pretty wired, you may already know these tools listed below. I’d recommend them to anybody, especially writers who need to save time and be more productive.

• John’s Background Switcher — JBS is more about inspiration than productivity, but it’s the best way I’ve found to enjoy my thousands of garden photographs. If your pictures are trapped on a computer, John’s Background Switcher lets you dip into them, bit by bit, by using your picture collection to periodically refresh the wallpaper image on your PC desktop. You set the time interval and tell JBS where to look for your pictures; I’ve set mine to refresh every ten minutes with images from my Flickr “garden” folder. And because each new desktop image shows the date, it’s continuously jogging my sense of what blooms when… a great way to improve gardening knowledge by osmosis. Best of all, it’s free software.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking — This is voice-recognition. Very Star Trek. Right now I’m speaking this into my headset and every word is transcribed on the screen, with about 98% accuracy. Whether you write lots of little e-mails or churn out thousands of words a week, this will save you time. I began using voice-recognition a few years ago when I developed repetitive strain injury from typing, and at the time Dragon NaturallySpeaking was given to me as a journalist review copy. I never did the write-up because I suspected, rightly, that it was always capable of better performance than my struggling old PC could deliver. On my new PC DNS flies along; don’t attempt it unless you have plenty of memory and a microphone-equipped headset that plugs into a USB port. Headsets that plug into your standard microphone and headphone ports are too slow for high-quality voice-recognition. Dragon sells at retail for about £150.
• Google Reader — keep an eye on your favourite garden journalists, blogs and publications by subscribing to their website’s RSS feeds. RSS feeds are just the guts of the stories — plain-looking text and basic images — which are sucked out of the fancy-looking websites for you to read altogether as a simple list of headlines and stories in an RSS reader, like Google Reader. Check your favourite websites to see if they have an RSS feed; or, inside Google Reader, search for feeds by a keyword like “gardening.” A great timesaver, especially for editors who need to keep an eye on everything. The software is free from Google and works with other useful software tools like Feedly for Firefox (Firefox is an excellent free web browser alternative to Internet Explorer).
• Twitter — another free service which is being exploited so well by many gardening journalists and publications, not least The Telegraph, The Guardian, Garden Answers, and in the US magazines like Fine Gardening. Most publications use Twitter to tease and put links to their content on the web. But more exciting is the “crowdsourcing” of ideas that publications like Fine Gardening are doing on Twitter. They regularly survey the Twitter population to get ideas and recommendations about plants and things to do in the garden, to solicit competition entries, and more. FG is well wired: its website’s Pronunciation Guide for Plants, with “hear-it-out-loud” Latin plant names, is perfectly geared towards its US market, where common names rather than Latin names prevail.

How can gardening media in the UK and elsewhere make best use of technology and the web? It’s a question that the blog Landscape Juice, among others, has been asking. As print readerships continue to wilt, the thinking caps will need to go on.