For the love of hippeastrums

dahliasIt’s here. It’s finally almost here. The coming of spring means that is finally time for the Annual Suburban Garden competition!

I know, I know, it probably isn’t too interesting to most people out there, but my goodness, I positively live for it. I’ve won in my area for, oh I don’t know now, the three out of the past five years, but I’ve never made it through to the next round. Well, this year is my year. I’ve already worked out what pattern I’m going to go with and the colour scheme I’m going to splash onto my blank canvas of a garden. This year, I really need to raise the stakes. I have to source the finest dahlias from around the state – nothing but the best will do for my garden.

I realise it’s all supposed to be entirely confidential, to preserve the integrity of the competition, but a friend of mine on the judging panel told me I lost out to Ms. Matilda Clark on Elm St. I went to have a look at her garden, after all, I wanted to see who I’d lost out to. While the pattern and composition of her garden was nothing spectacular, it was the quality of her sonatini hippeastrums that led to the most incredible hyacinths I have seen in a long time. It wasn’t the grooming of the hyacinths that was remarkable, but rather the quality of the flower itself, something determined almost entirely by its merits as a bulb. This is why it is absolutely paramount that, this year, my tulip bulbs are of a superior quality to Ms. Clark’s. Short of sabotage, the only thing I can do is find the best tulip bulbs for my garden. Which is precisely what I mean to do.