In my greenhouse

June. From the bleak vantage point of the winter solstice, summer seems like an implausible, evanescent dream. It is a fairly safe bet that the earth will once again tilt on its axis, winter will release its grip and life will return to the land but it isn't hard to understand why our ancestors felt it expedient to sacrifice a few virgins to the relevant god, just to be on the safe side. Since virgins are apparently now rarer than hen's teeth (see here), perhaps it's no bad thing we live in an age of reason and enlightenment (see here).

Most of my June evenings this year, once the children were safely in bed, featured rubber gloves, a disposable mask and a roll of extra absorbent kitchen paper. As every galanthophile will immediately recognise, these items are essential tools of the trade for twin scalers. Twin scaling is the black art of propagating certain amenable genera of plants by slicing their dormant bulbs into transparently thin slivers of tissue, each attached to a fragment of basal plate, and incubating the slices in moist vermiculite until they produce bulbils, clones of the parent bulb. I use the technique mainly to bulk up rare snowdrop and daffodil cultivars more quickly than conventional cultivation allows. If you've seen the sublime garlic slicing scene in Goodfellas (if not, watch it here), you'll have a good idea of what's involved. Paulie, more of an expert on human than Allium anatomy I'd guess, is cutting transverse slices through the bulb, whereas they would have to be longitudinal to work. His razor blade control is impressive though.

The technique relies on the fact that some bulbs are adapted to regenerate from small pieces of meristematic tissue left behind when the plant has been attacked by disease or predators. Twin scaling is essentially the deliberate wounding of bulbs - we gardeners are merciless - to stimulate this response. The tissue slivers are vulnerable to disease for the two or three months it takes bulbils to form and operating theatre standards of hygiene are essential, hence the mask, gloves and surgical spirit.

By early September the results of my misspent June evenings were visible as rice-grain sized proto-bulbs, forming at the base of the cleft between each pair of scales. I potted these up, doused them with two different fungicides and put them under the greenhouse benches. Over the last two or three weeks the first of the twin scales have started to produce shoots. So far as I can tell, emergence date is a function of both the natural emergence time of bulbs of the relevant cultivar and the date on which the scales were potted up. This year the first to appear were 'Early to Rize' and 'Farringdon Double', adult bulbs of which are also flowering in another part of the garden.

Emerging twin scales

I think that I derive more satisfaction from this moment of triumph than any other event in the gardening cycle. Of course it will take another two or three years of careful cultivation before the first of the current crop of twin scales flower but already, in my imagination, I can see vast clumps of Farringdon Double - discovered in an Oxfordshire graveyard, according to The Bible - blowing the socks off visitors just before Christmas 2014.