It’s hard to beat a carpet of autumn-flowering cyclamen.
It’s funny how your tastes change as you get older. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t stand cyclamen. I thought them a little gaudy. I couldn’t stand them in those naff baskets that people keep them indoors in.
But a few years ago, I saw some spring-flowering cyclamen scrambling up a bank in Devon. And a few years after that I saw a carpet of them in autumn under some trees at Wakehurst Place. There were thousands of them, so dainty and bright.
Last year I took to buying bargain cyclamen from the garden centre and planting them under the leylandii in our garden. I’ve done the same this year in the woodland patch, which is so jolly in the spring, but looks so lonely at present. I hope that they will spread and eventually form that bright carpet that changed my mind about these sweet flowers.
