Notes From Madoo*

April dug its own grave and let no nicety of May be its marker. Its final place is wide and very deep and in it are tossed its many misdeeds: wheelbarrows of frost-browned magnolia blossoms line the bottom, finish the top; an elegant Kamchatka birch toppled by one of the many gales the month reveled in, destructed withes of daffodils, buckets of frost and truckloads of snow, lakes of rain, and all other things torn and toppled (and this includes a now legless bench) went into the pile.

If there is room, I shall also tip the uselessness of hours spent indoors; frosted-in-transit packaged plants lined in ranks in the summer studio like some young, stalled army awaiting orders. Many did not make it. And I must not forget to toss those many bottles and vials of prescriptives for the various throat and bronchial afflictions the month caused, but how can one bury a sore throat, inter a cough? Farmers could not plow or plant their boggy fields.

April is a month of hellish mode spawned somewhere in the most remote islands of the North with March as its heart and January thaws and freezes for blood. If months are mansions, April is a slum.

That it wrecked the magnolias again is hardly news, but this year, the myriad rises and drops of temperature held some species back, brought others more forward so that this was to be the first year Magnolia stellata would bloom with Magnolia Soulangeana, a pink and crystal pairing that the frosts singed like fury until all lay on paths and earth, curled in a most hideous, gellid rictus. Slaughter, nothing less, the beautiful rare moment gone.

And yet, just as in times of greatest tyranny, when malign governments grind and crush their populations, a few great words and songs take wing, the smallest elements of the garden grew and prospered in an almost medieval pageantry of mille-fleurs. There, inches above the cold, sodden soil, were indigos, azures, and gentians; citrons and lemons (zest and rind); mauves and purples and magentas above the matchless perfections of their small, eruptive foliage. It was a stately procession, a royal progress of incredible lavishness.

I speak about the little bulbs, scattered through the lawn, bounding up between pebbles and paving, massed beneath the bare branches of shrubs, the stubs of perennials. These and the almost too-green grass gave much sticking power to the wet, miserable gardener. Let us never neglect them and plant them more and more, each year a bit more, adding to our little store of courage.

All of these doughty performers come from wind and sun-swept screes and stony uplands, from Greece and Turkey and Northern Iran and the Southern Republics of Russia and yes, you find them in the Alps, too, as well as the Dolomites and the Urals and those many islands, great and small, of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. They are as exotic and myriad and diverse as the people they share the earth with. Most lie under snow and stone, have but a brief period of rain and then bake the other many months, so that any part of the garden with sandy or poor soil will do for their humble needs. Their wants being few, a bit of lime and bone meal is all one needs to add.

Think not of Darwin, Cottage, or Peony tulips, they are a bit gaudy and municipal by now, think low and little and come upon the flames of Praestans Fusilier, an eight-inch multi-flowerer with utter reliability, immune to wind and cold, a specie tulip that multiplies each year and needs not (squirrels and chipmunks and voles excepted) replacement or lifting. And the perfections of Urumiensis, with gold inside and spots of, yes, olive and red without, shorter than Praestans by a good three inches.

And I have a whole carpet or should I say runner weaving in and out of inkberry and crimson barberry of Dasystemon, white stars with clear, yellow centers. And I want and will get the Red Crocus tulip (Pulchella violacea) to go with the Clusiana I have, the latter a pointed tulip as high as Praestans. Mixtures of the tiny bulbs are quite splendid and Van Engelen (23 Tulip Drive, Bantam, Conn. 06750) will sell you 100 for only $13.50.

Of course, plant them where you will want to see them, just as long as they have strong sun, but the best is to thread them through your perennials and shrubs, whose succeeding leafing will shield their maturing foliage. As you cultivate you will, of course, be inadvertently lifting some of the tiny bulbs, which will then reward you by falling unnoticed, here and there, and taking hold. Then they are most brilliant, I think, seen alone the following year, a color jolt to stop your tracks.

I love their names quite as much as their flowers and was drawn to Puschkinia libanotica 10 years ago, a skimmed-milk, squill-like fluff of blue now gracing I can't count how many niches and ever increasing. They are under shrubs and between bricks and through pebbles and at doorsteps where they are so vibrant one would think the earth itself was tossing.

Quite the find is the Old House Gardens catalogue ($2, 536 Third Street, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48103). Begun in 1993 by Mr. and Mrs. Scott Kunst, former schoolteachers, it is the only mail order firm entirely devoted to antique bulbs. They sell not many varieties, but what they do is extraordinarily choice. Resist, if you can, the "Florentine or Wood Tulip (T. sylvestris), 1597. T. florentina, species, 8-14 inches."

With nodding buds, pointed yellow petals, and a scent of violets, this graceful wildling may have been in Italian gardens in the 12th century. Gerard pictured it in 1597, Jefferson grew it at Monticello, and it has naturalized in the gardens of the great Victorian nurseryman George Ellwanger in Rochester, N.Y., as well as at relic sites in Pennsylvania where it's often called the "Dutch tulip."

"It's reportedly hardy from zones 4 to 10, but I can't vouch for that! Repeat bloom can be sparse. Recommendations include siting it in a hot, dryish spot, adding lime, or planting it over buried rocks. Please tell me what works for you." The Jefferson attribution leads me to a small but growing clump of nodding, lily-shaped yellow tulips with a curious green glow I grew from seed, now doing quite well in their fourth year of bloom. Henry Adams, former curator of Monticello, sent seven seeds on to me.

Seed-grown bulbs are easy if you are patient. Give them a season of cold in the refrigerator, plant them in a clay pot with sand or perlite added to any commercial growing mixture, and plunge pot above the rim into any corner of the garden you don't till. And forget it. And there they will be just when they had left your mind. They are one of the things stared at that never seem to grow. But neglect them and they will.

There are many other April-Be-Gones - crocus, squill, species daffodil (enough of the large-cupped trumpets!), anemone blanda (wind-flower), erythronium, fritillaria, ipheion. . . . I have a colony of snowdrops at the base of a birch, near the arches of a large stephanandra that sends up, however cold, blooms by mid-January, a combination of drying soil the birch hoicked up, protected by nearby wind-absorbing hedges, a focus for sunlight. These have touches of green when you lift their little bells and, even that early, a midge or two.

*Madoo (old Scots for "My Dove") is my garden. It became a public entity, the Madoo Conservancy, in 1993.