When I was a young teacher I once foolishly volunteered to clear a piece of ground for a school garden without realising that lurking beneath the soil were thousands of small bulbs, each with several babies clinging to its skirts. It was the Grape hyacinth, Muscari neglectum, and I filled several black bags. No one wanted any needless to say and, despite my best efforts, plenty still managed to survive. I suspect they are still there today.

This bulb is not only a thug. It seems out of kilter with the others, producing green leaves in autumn, then overwintering until spring before becoming a tangle of leaf. And yet the white-edged flowers look lovely in a vase and I have seen it fighting it out with primroses to great effect in spring.

Gardeners are put off by over-enthusiastic plants and they pull the same sort of expression I saw on aged aunt’s faces when I veered towards them full of youthful exuberance. However, there are plenty of small blue bulbs (including muscari) with much less pushy natures. Muscari armeniacum has more pyramidal flower heads in a warmer shade of blue. The warm-red highlights on the buds remind me of gas flames on a sooty hob. Yes, they produce too much leaf for the size of flower, but the flowers are crisper and neater than most.

There are fancy versions of M. armeniacum and they include the fuzzy, plump ‘Blue Spike’. This has touches of bright green on the bud giving a spring-fresh look. The lavender-blue ‘Fantasy Creation’ is slightly surreal, but both look good in the garden or grown in pots. If you want really surreal seek out the feathery, heather-purple plumes of M. comosum ‘Plumosum’. They seem to smoulder on the ground.

There are also baby blues and ‘Valerie Finnis’ produces a slender simple spike shaded in cool-green. How could such an icy plant bear the name of someone so spirited. Well it was discovered growing in the lawn at The Dower House in Northamptonshire, a home she shared with her husband, Sir David Scott. Many of her pictures feature in Ursula Buchan’s fine book Garden People, published by Thames and Hudson.

Perhaps the even neater, pale-blue Muscari azureum, with its tight head of buds skirted by ragged bells, would also please. The joy of blue flowers is that they frame yellows and oranges so well. We are about to enter the daffodil season and all that bright-yellow can be too dazzling, even if you restrict yourself to miniature narcissi as I tend to.

The scillas are even bluer and the best cobalt-blue is Scilla siberica ‘Spring Beauty’. The almost black stems support pendant flowers in bright-blue and these are set off by green glossy leaves that aren’t untidy.

Ordinary S. siberica is almost as good and both will grow in shade and seed about after flowering in March and April.

Recently, when giving a talk, I was presented with a bulb that flowers in February and I now think this was Scilla mischtschenkoana, a pale, starry ice-blue scilla with flowers mid-ribbed in a slightly darker ice-blue. The dark stem makes this a charmer and yet I have never grown it, something I intend to rectify.