Anna Pavord loves bulbs more than I do

It’s embarrassing to admit that the only Pavord book I know is The Tulip, but I suspect I am not alone. Nonetheless, she’s written a lot of others, including Plant Partners, The Flowering Year, The New Kitchen Garden, and more. I think my favorite title among her books is Searching for Order. It’s actually a reprint of an earlier title, The Naming of Names.

 The Tulip is still Pavord’s most famous title, and it is a fascinating read, but she’s just written a book all bulb aficionados, fanatics, and obsessives must have. Pavord's new book is called Bulb. It describes 600 different bulbs, with images of every one, giving practical, opinionated advice as well as historical background and basic descriptions. The images may be pure porn, but the text brings you back down to earth, as follows: “In the lilies listed below you will not find any of the new dwarfed kinds (which I think are foul—lacking in any of the grace and elegance with which nature endowed the family).”

Pavord (photo by George Wright)

I talked to the author about Bulb over the phone on Friday; here are some excerpts from our conversation, as well as some images of Pavord’s favorite bulbs, as found in my garden. As Pavord required, each of the 600 flowers in the book has its own gorgeous photograph by Andrew Lawson.

 As far as I’m concerned, this is a great big book on bulbs, and it’s wonderful. I don't feel like I need to know anything else.

(Laughs) Don’t you think the photographs are fantastic? I started out thinking, when I began with this book, that it should be like a jewel box and that everywhere you looked, these things would be gleaming out at you saying "Look you’ve just got to have me!" But for that you need a very particular type of photograph, a beautiful sensuous image …  Also, quite honestly, although I started out with this idea that every one of these 600 bulbs in the book should have its own image, I never imagined that I’d actually be allowed to do it. ... They’ve [publishers Mitchell Beazley]been so amazingly generous. 

The henryi lilium and other species lilies get favored treatment in Bulb.

On the cover you have one of my favorite tulips of all time, Prinses Irene.

Yes, and who can describe it; it’s so difficult with Prinses Irene, isn’t it, the way those purple flushes climb up the back of the orange petals.  It’s an amazingly complex tulip, that. And beautifully scented. It is a fabulous creature.

We know you for The Tulip. This is very different.

 The Tulip was like a biography; it just happened to be about a flower rather than a person. I was telling its story—where it was born, where it had been, the adventures it had had. That was very much a narrative; there was a story there, an incredible story.  But this bulb book was in my mind always as a reference book, a book that contained enough beautiful bulbs for the whole of a gardening life. If you planted 10 new things a year you’d have 60 years of gardening before you would run out. This was not a book where I had to worry about the construction or the narrative because I just started at A and worked my way all the way through to Zed.

… These are incredibly beautiful things. We don’t need to know about their structure and their form the way we do with shrubs, trees, and herbaceous perennials. A bulb just exists to flower; that’s all it does. It’s like the best sort of dinner guest: it arrives on time, it does its fabulous thing, it sparkles, and then it goes before you get tired of it. Who could expect anything more of a plant? And that’s why these pictures need to just concentrate on the flower, because they’re not pretending to give you anything else.

I grow both the Prinses Irene and this double version, Orange Princess.

How comprehensive are you in this book? How much have you covered?

I don’t know. There are 2000 narcissus alone. Could you lift up a book that had pictures of 2000 narcissus in it? For 40 years, I’ve kept card indexes of everything I’ve grown, so there was a lot of information about bulbs I’ve grown to work with, but there was no way one volume—even one as heavy as this one—could cover all of it. I felt 600 bulbs was enough to keep a gardener going. It includes all the things you’d expect to find like the crocus, the alliums, the camassias, the daffodils, and it also actually tries to include things that I’ve grown and been intrigued by, like the veltheimias, the bellavalias, the gloriosa superba, and that’s because one likes to include things you don’t see around so much, if there’s a good reason to grow them. If people have time and if they should be so inclined, I’d say why not have a go? At the end of the book, for example, there are zephyranthus and zigadenus, neither of which I’d grown until I’d started the book, but I’m just so glad because both of them—for completely different reasons—were enchanting plants to grow.

 

All the erythronium varieties are celebrated in Bulb.

So, are tulips still your favorites?

I’ll never be able to leave tulips behind. The class has so much staggering variety in it. Those genetic pools from which the tulip has come—how amazing that a single flower can do so many things. I suppose that it’s the species tulips that I’ve grown to love the most because they do settle and stay in a garden in a way that the bigger varieties sometimes don’t. The tulipa orphanidea Whittallii remains way out there as my number one bulb. No picture does it justice, because it has this extraordinary perfect form with the pointed petals meeting in the center to make a perfect bud. And then you get this plating of cream on the outside of the tangerine, toffee-colored petals. And if you look inside, you would see that there is this beautiful smudgy olive green base in the bottom. It is a thing of such staggering finesse and beauty.

What about people who give up on bulbs because they don’t always return year after year?

Look, come on, there is no better value than bulbs. Even if they don’t come back, you have gotten your $5 worth, haven’t you? When I finally got out to Kazakstan, I did realize that even out there, even in the cradle of the tulip, it is absolutely wrong to expect every single tulip to produce a flower every single year. This is not how it is in the wild. It’s a fantastic effort to get that flower out, and when they’ve done it, it then takes them 5-6 years to build up the strength to flower again.

I find that the single late tulips have old blood in them and are good at settling into clumps, where, after 5-6 years, you have the impression of a good group of tulips. But even with one season, to me it’s still money very well spent. Don’t give up on bulbs.

.....

Which is a good point to end this interview excerpt, because I agree. I treat fully half of my bulbs as annuals; the only ones I depend on for return are the species tulips, the lilies, the galanthus, the daffodils, and a few other ephemerals. I probably go further than Pavord in my prodigal attitude toward these plants, though I know she plants hundreds each year, especially since she has a new, better-draining garden in Dorset. Her new obsession is iris. I think we may know what book to expect next. 

I have used my own photographs here partly because I didn't have good digitals of the ones in the book, but, more important, because my attraction to this book is based so much on the fact that many of the bulbs in it are my favorites too. 

Comments

[Tara Dillard]

The last gift a beloved mentor-friend-client gave me was The Tulip. It had just been published.

She's also the one turning me on to Beverley Nichols books.

I follow that mentoring and strive to matchmake garden books with gardening friends.

Can't wait to read this new title.

Garden & Be Well, XO Tara

[Michelle D.]

Fantastic writing and overview of the new book "Blub" and some insight on the brilliant author Anna Parvord.

I'm so glad that you asked the question , " How comprehensive are you in this book? How much have you covered? ".
This is exactly what I needed to know.
As one who has dwindling limited library space I scrutinize new books to make sure that the book is really warranted and is not duplicating an older book that I may have.
I usually reach for "Unwins Flowering Bulbs in Color" , a 1973 published English book for the more common bulbs and then rely on a book from the Southern Hemisphere for the other more unusual and exotic bulbs that do well in my temperate zone 9 garden.
I'll definitely be visiting a good bookstore in the future to check this book out soon.
Anna Pavord is a gifted writer.

[Michelle D.]

How embarrassing, "Blub" ...
Oh dear gawd.
Please help my brain.

: - )

[Lynn]

Well you're both making me very sorry I didn't buy any new bulbs this year, but only because we expect to move. Your photo has inspired me to deck the next place in Erythroniums, native and not. God knows what I'll do after seeing 600 sensuous bulb photographs! Thanks for a great interview.

[John]

No No NO NO NO... you know what this is gonna do to me! Every two or three years my gardening style shifts from one direction to another. Hostas were replaced with Ferns, Trees were removed and edibles took over, then salvias and agastaches, then cupheas, then tropical fruit trees in pots and back to edibles but only heirlooms. When will it end?

Thanks. And Christmas is only days away.

[Mr. McGregor's Daughter]

This sounds like a great book for those cold winter nights when we're dreaming of spring.

[Susan aka Miss R]

I've been a Pavord fan for years. I still reach for Plant Partners to get me 'unstuck', The Tulip was a great read as was her column in Gardens Illustrated. They were in fact must reads...this one will be too...as soon as my library can get it for me.

[vicki]

Thank you for this post!!
Loved it.

[Helen at Toronto Gardens]

So many books, so little garden. This sounds like a winner, and you were so lucky to be able to interview her. Thanks.

And thank you to Michelle for "Blub" which added some welcome silliness to the end of my day. I'm still laughing.

[Robin Ripley]

I'm laughing my head off over this line..."I felt 600 bulbs was enough to keep a gardener going." I think I can keep going on a lot less than that!

Great interview!

Robin

[GenYgardener]

So if I start planting next year, I should get through her book at age 86. Sounds doable.

At my last job, I put Anna Pavord on hold. My boss was aghast--Put Anna Pavord on hold?! She's doing us a favor and calling from England and you put her on hold! I was ignorant and didn't know who she was. Oh, the shame.

[Dee/reddirtramblings]

Great interview. I grow many, many tulips and treat all but the species ones as annuals. We buy other annuals for the garden. Why not tulips too?~~Dee

[Dianne B]

Although I amazed by the omission of Fritillaria meleagris as one of the most endearing and endurable - I can't wait to get my hands on Pavord's Bulbs.

Dianne B