Category — Bulbs

Paul Scherer, with his black heart open to the sun

Queen of the Night, ditto

I got ‘Paul Scherer’ because I love the deep, the black, and the mysterious, and I want as much of it in my garden as possible. I was also curious to see how it compared with ‘Queen of the Night’. Pretty closely, as it turns out.

The white bloom on the buds and very new flowers of Queen of the Night

is pretty closely echoed by Paul Scherer in a similar stage.

At first, I thought Paul Scherer had a more mahogany-red tint than Queen of the Night’s plum overtones.  But look at them both here: can’t make much of a case for that:

Queen of the Night has a distinct mahogany tint in sun

as does Paul Scherer

Then I thought that Paul Scherer was maybe a little more matte than Queen of the Night, a touch less shine to the petals. Maybe. But as Paul Scherer aged, it became harder and harder to tell them apart. Same purple-black anthers (before pollination). Same shiny creamy-white stigma and style. Even the blue-black-hint-of-white markings at the base of the flower are similar.

Queen of the Night. The split stigma happens after pollination. Since the pollen is still dark, that means the deed has just been done.

Paul Scherer, in a slightly earlier stage.

Every time I shot a picture, I made sure to shoot the label of the plant first, so I could tell which was which when I went through the photos. (Shooting labels is my shorthand for having a photographer’s notebook. This could be a Handy Tip for you. I don’t use it very consistently, but for botanical gardens and indistinguishable sprouts,  or these two tulips, it’s ideal.)

I got Queen of the Night because - because it just always seems weird, the years I don’t order her, and I haven’t gotten enough of a return bloom from her to live on that alone. (Perennializing tulips is one of my not-always-successful hobbies.) I love her deepness, her blackness, her unadorned and unashamed drama.

The only difference was that Queen of the Night emerged a few days to a week later than Paul Scherer, at least this year. Which might mean that when Paul Scherer settles in, he will be fading as she comes out. Officially, they are both single late tulips, and unofficially, this is a very screwy year for order of bulb bloom, so it seems likely that they’ll bloom at the same time next year, if I get them to come back.

I did the Ultimate Observation test: I cut one of each tulip and put them in a vase I pass many times a day. If you want to see a flower develop up close, this is a good way to do it. But if you want the color to be the same as it would have been outdoors, you must wait until the tulip has been open a day or two.  Color develops last in the tulip bud, and the sun seems to have a role in developing or at least stabilizing it. If you cut them a day or two after they’ve opened,  you get less vase time, but more accurate viewing.

So that’s what I did, and you know what? Even up close and personal, the only way I could tell the difference was that I’d left a leaf on Paul Scherer, and cleaned off the stem of Queen of the Night. I was glad I’d done that, actually.

I’ve read rumors, supposedly kept darkly secret, that any tulip that is too popular for too long develops a virus. * Queen of the Night has been around since about 1940, and has been deservedly popular all that time. So the industry is worried that it will develop a virus which will inevitably rush through all the cloned crop, just the way potatoes wilted by the thousands in Ireland. All of them exactly the same stock of potato.

Maybe Paul Scherer has been developed to step in in just such an emergency, and that is why he is so nearly like Queen of the Night. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - and the best safeguard to a continuing buying audience. Movie moguls understand this, clearly.

If you’re not involved in the murky underworld of tulip marketing, it’s hard not to innocently enjoy more of what you love already. Tulips can’t have the creativity squeezed out of them the way movies can. We tend to think we’re very powerful, but we’re not strong enough to eradicate this flower’s personality, and its personality is just why we like it. As for these tulips, I like - no, I’m not ashamed to say it, I love -  both of them. I don’t know which personality is which, and I don’t care.

So I enjoyed my double harvest, my two black tulips, and I enjoyed them even more because some of the colored ones I’d planted to bloom with them never showed up, or didn’t set them off the way I’d hoped, so that I had  a sea of darkly luminous tulip heads under the Ponderosa pine. A srange sight to some, but wonderful to me.

Can you tell which is which here? I can’t

Besides enjoying Queen of the Night and Paul Scherer together, I found a third flower which is their perfect foil: pale pale blush tulip ‘Silverado’. I only found it out because I had a few of each left in the garden, so I put them in a vase together. It was too late in their lives to document the beautiful bonding, but there was something blue in each of the shades that set each other off perfectly. I’m going to let them spend more time together next year, and see what develops.

Silverado, Queen of the Night, and Paul Scherer.  I can only identify Silverado for sure.

*I think this may apply to humans, too.

While reference books gave me a little sense of the role ‘Beersheeba’ played in daffodil history, I thought I’d like to branch out a little, to see if I could find more of Beersheba’s story.

The ‘snippet views’ at Google Books can be tantalizingly frustrating - they give you only a bit of a sentence around the word you are searching for. Still, even these tiny offerings can offer insight: I would love to know what the House of Commons debated on NARCISSUS ‘BEERSHEBA’ in 1971. But that knowledge is denied me.

Even the scantiest information makes it clear that ‘Beersheba’ was used extensively in breeding, and remained one of the most popular white daffodils for many years after its introduction to the world.  It won prize after prize, and not only in England. The  New Zealand Railways Magazine pictured Beersheba among six of “the best blooms shown at the National and Auckland Daffodil Shows, 1932.” The famous daffodil breeder Guy Wilson used Beersheeba in his breeding programs, ensuring that Beersheeba genes got into the many daffodils that have been bred off his own hybrids. Even a brief glance at breeding records from the UK and the US shows that Beersheba chlorophyll may be lurking in many of our modern white daffodils, so popular was it for breeding early in the century.

But Beersheba also shone on its own, not just as a parent. Its long popularity testifies to that. In 1939, the Herbertia, the American Plant Society’s publication, mentioned Beersheba as a “supreme variety, fully proven”.

In 1948, 25 years after ‘Beersheba’ first made its appearance, “Flowers in Colour” (obviously a pamphlet meant for general home-garden use, nothing esoteric) lists it as “a pure white, producing finely shaped large flowers suitable for second-early forcing or for garden decoration”. When they first open, the “pure white” - the trumpets, particularly - is more of a cream. And grown in shade, the trumpet of my Beersheeba stays creamy. With more sun, they go to that sparkling white these older records keep warbling about.

“In 1966, daffodil expert George S. Lee, Jr., lauded ‘Beersheba’ -then the most widely grown of all white trumpets-as a “flower of perfect form and purity of color that it still holds its own after 40 years, ” reports Scott Kunst, in a 1989 version of his Old-House Journal. Scott Kunst is the owner of Old House Gardens, where I got my Beersheba bulbs. Yes, the world of heirloom bulbs is a small one.

McClure and Zimmerman, which also carries Beersheeba, describes it as “a more delicate version of Mt. Hood” (another heirloom white, which I am very fond of). This description appears word-for-word as a Martha Steward article quote, so I assume it was cribbed from McClure and Zimmerman. While generally McClure and Zimmerman’s writeups strike me as amazingly good (they’re one of the remaining catalogues that relies on words and line drawings to entice), this one strikes me as an insult to both Mt. Hood and Beersheba. It’s like saying an ear of wheat is a more delicate version of corn on the cob. It is, but their uses and personality are so different that saying so doesn’t get us much further forward.

On the other hand, another tiny snippet gave me a lot of information, since I have the context to put it in: Elizabeth Lawrence liked Beersheeba. For some of us, that’s enough, as far as garden taste goes. It also means that this is a daffodil that will do well in warmer areas, up through about zone 8, or maybe higher in the west.

But clearly Beersheba is a wide-ranging daffodil. Dave’s Garden lists the plant as growing in Garberville, California (a northern California town with mild winters and burning summers) and Nantucket, Massachusetts (a lot colder). There are clues to this in some of the older snippets, as well as some of the more modern writeups on what has now become a hard-to-find antique: Beersheba is recognized as a reliable garden citizen, coming back and establishing itself comfortably.

Sometimes it’s good, though painful, to smash old worlds and go on to something new. But Beersheeba is such a beautiful survivor of another world: I’d like to see it come back. Partly because that would signify that at least sometimes, there is a place in the world for the refreshment of quiet beauty.

Hey! I thought I’d lost it! but my lovely heirloom ‘Beersheba’ is back in my garden again.

As you can see, Beersheeba is a refined daffodil, with its smooth long trumpet and gently incandescent petals.

It reflects the sensibility of the age it was bred in. But wait - this daffodil is from 1923. Wasn’t that flappers, screaming colors, LOUD? Well, part of it was. And the person who bred this daffodil was also devoted to the screaming colors, as we shall see. But it takes five to seven years to bring a daffodil from pollination to seed, so the aesthetic of the flower is an interesting cross between the tastes of several years before (when the pollination was planned), and the tastes of the current time (when you decide whether it stays in the garden, or gets put in the compost pile). That means Beersheeba was conceived in the thick of WWI.

Rev. Engleheart may have named Beersheeba as a peace offering to the Battle of Beersheeba in 1917, a well-known battle in the Sinai and Palestine campaign in WWI. (Beersheeba, or Be’er Sheva, is a town in what is now Israel, near Jerusalem.) In 1923, England would have been full of war victims, and still devastated by the upheaval of the war that changed the world forever.

It’s hard for us to conceive what it was like to be in the aftermath of WWI, although I contend that it’s a war we’re still reeling from, the war that brought us into the modern world and left the old one smashed forever. In England, shocking numbers of a generation were dead, the class system was in the  beginnings of upheaval, and the memories of bombing, cold rooms, and scanty food were fresh, as was the shellshock of the men returning.

 Maybe it’s human nature to turn toward plants for peace, because this time was also a heyday for the modern daffodil, evolving since the 1880s. Beersheeba’s breeder, Rev. G. H. Engleheart, was a daffodil man, one of the amateurs doing their part right in there with the professionals.

All white daffodils originally come from the wild Narcissus pseudonarcissus subsp. moschatus. What Engleheart did was cross a seedling with one of the early white daffodil hybrids, ‘White Knight’. “…it was immediately recognized as way out in front of any other runners. Strong bulbs, healthy dark foliage, and sturdy stems held flowers of amazing size and very distinct character. Long triangular petals were welded at right angles to the trumpet, with no hint of leaning forward. Trumpets were long and narrow, but neatly flanged. Above all else, soon after opening, the flowers were a sparkling pure white. It was the first white to gain real recognition from the general public.”

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Engleheart worked on poet daffodil crosses, and bred brighter-flowered daffodils which were a part of later professional breeding programs. He also worked on white and pale-colored daffodils, which led to Beersheba. It was the daffodil which made him immortal, at least to the lovers of narcissus.  “…still a white trumpet to be reckoned with well after the Second World War,” as Michael Jefferson-Brown puts it in 1991.

Next post: more about Beersheeba, and why we should care about it now.

Reference: Narcissus, Michael Jefferson-Brown,Timber Press, 1991

As my geek complement to Daffodil Planter’s Daffodil Blogarama and the many other daffodil posts flashing yellow, pale pink, and white over the web, I’m offering a peek into the daffodil world of a hundred years ago.

Although maybe it’s not so geeky, since it’s mostly concentrated on sex. Daffodil sex, that is. Though a man of the cloth, the author of the “Daffodils” book in the British Present-Day Gardening series, Reverend Joseph Jacob,  has a passion for breeding. And, even more shockingly,  he thinks everyone should share it. “This fascinating pursuit, hobby, or business, to give it names which are appropriate to the different ends in view, is one which I advise every Daffodil cultivator to take up; whether it be for pleasure or with a view to business it is equally alluring and interesting.” (pg. 39) He talks of going from town to town in England, lecturing at daffodil societies, and how the members hung on his lips, asking questions about do-it-yourself breeding.

I wonder if the national convention of the American Daffodil Society will have any similar seminars? These days, we think of daffodil breeding as something only specialists can do, with special equipment and large fields and greenhouses. But, Jacobs says,  all we really need are labels and notebooks, plus little boxes for storing and carrying pollen (it’s viable for about two weeks, if you keep it dry and clean in a loosely covered box) and a camel’s hair brush, gently moistened in the mouth so the pollen will stick to it.

‘Minnow’, a miniature unavailable in Jacob’s time

That’s all the physical equipment that’s required. The rest of it lies in knowledge, and patience.

One of the bits of knowledge we need to try our hand at our own hybrids is knowing when the time is ripe for sex. “…the best time for cross-fertilisation is between 10 A.M and 4 P.M….that in cold and sunless weather the operations should be repeated more than once…that the pollen brushes must be kept very clean, and all the pollen of one variety carefully removed before the same brush is used for any other variety; that it is not found necessary in practice to cover the fertilised bloom in any way with glass or muslin; and that, the seed-bearer should be growing in a  good open position.” (pg. 44-45)

But the deeper knowledge that’s required, the one all those daffodil societies were swarming around Jacob hoping to get, is the knowledge of family background. Some daffodils are good pollinators, some are not.  Since most of the daffodils of a hundred years ago are lost or obscure, I’m going to save his complete lists for the very end of this post, in the hope that some of you have grown the ones I don’t know about, or will be able to point out sources for them.

From his list of “Potent Pollen-Parents” (I told you it was about sex), only  a few remain that are available today: all the poet varieties, W.P. Milner,  and King Alfred. (King Alfred, as I’ve explained before,   is an antique daffodil that’s actually hard to find. If you read the fine type, you will see that below most ‘King Alfred’ blurbs is “King Alfred type”, which basically means any yellow trumpet daffodil that looks more or less like King Alfred and is cheap in production. They may not have the same pollen potency as their predecessor.)

King Alfred is also on the list of “Good Seed-Bearers”, as are most of the poet varieties. Golden Spur, another good seeder, is available through Old House Gardens, as is Lily Langtry. (I’ve grown Golden Spur, a simple yellow trumpet that makes the modern ones look a bit as if they’re on steroids; I have yet to make the acquaintance of the divine Mrs. Langtry.)

Of the “Shy Seeders” I recognize only Maximus (also available at OHG) and Empress, a daffodil I have admired but never bought due to price (I save my most extravagant bulb purchases for tulips, it seems. I might as well admit my prejudice; I have favorite children in the garden).

Amateur breeders today may have a harder time finding this kind of information, as breeding has become something specialized and hard in our minds. It’s making me wonder if a little diligent research among breeders might be a good idea.

But research won’t give me the final attribute I need for breeding: patience. “The one great drawback that can be urged against [breeding] is the time that must necessarily elapse between the seed-sowing and the harvest. From four to six or seven years is a long time to wait for results, but, as the oft-repeated quotation from old Philip Miller (1733) says, ‘After the first five years are past, if there be seeds sown every year, there will be annually a succession of flowers to show themselves; so that there will be a continual expectation, which will take off the tediousness which, during the first five years, might be very troublesome to some persons…’ ” (pg. 39-40)

Is it any wonder that I love old garden books? Where in modern literature would we find someone urging us, urging anyone, to go out in the garden with a camel’s hair brush and start our own hybrids?  Even if it takes seven years. And why not follow these old urgings? Many things have changed in the last hundred years, but, as a look at the emerging spring around us will show, sex still goes on in the same old way.

‘Colleen Bawn’ - an antique now, but still in the future in Jacob’s day

Reverend Joseph Jacob’s Lists of Breeding Daffodils

(I don’t know what the ordering system for these lists is; clearly, not alphabetical. Maybe order of bloom time?)

List of Thirty Good Seed-Bearers:

Duke of Bedford

Lady Margaret Boscawen

Minnie Hume

King Alfred

Mrs. R. Sydenham

Madame de Graaff

Weardale Perfection

Firebrand

Judge Bird

W.B. Hartland

Oriflamme

Most of the Poet varieties

Emperor

Henry Irving

Golden Spur

Pallidus Praecox

P.R. Barr

Eyebright

Glory of Nordwijk

Bernardino

Acme

Golden Bell

Alert

Mrs. Walter Ware

Princess Mary

Mrs. Langtry

Albicans

Evangeline

Lord Muncaster

Decora

List of Shy Seeders

Empress

Horsfieldii

Glory of Leiden

Homespun

Maximus

Sir Watkin

Gloria Mundi

Flora Wilson

Crown Prince

Duchess of Westminster

Autocrat

Potent Pollen-Parents

King Alfred

Maximus

Eyebright

Emperor

Weardale Perfection

Circlet

Madame de Graaff

W.P. Milner

All the Poet varieties

Lulworth

Castile

Poetarum (for its colour)

As the doctor stole nearer to Mary’s bed…he discovered the two sturdy little green heads pushing themselves above the brown earth….

‘I wonder if they-feel it so hard-to struggle up-as I,’ said Mary.

The doctor came close and bent over the pot. A small electric bedside light, shaded from Mary’s eyes, focused its rays on the two little green heads.

‘They’re not struggling at all. Nature’s gently pushing them up. When she’s ready–she’ll push you.’

Foursquare, Grace S. Richmond, pg. 197 (a little bit altered by me)

It’s been raining a lot lately. Today, it even snowed.

I believe we should always be grateful for rain. Water is wealth, and safety from fires, and no plant grows without at least some of its quenching force.

But I have to admit grey day after grey day is getting me down. So one rainy day lately, I picked up an old book I have around the house, and in it I found this passage about a pot of two tulips by a sickbed. I thought: I’d like a pot of tulips in my own house. Just to remind me that spring is coming.

I didn’t think I could actually have one, though. I like bulbs in big pots at least 18 inches (about 48 cm) across. Unless they’re my precious antique tulip bulbs, each of which gets its own pot.

And then there’s the unsavory fact that I’ve never successfully forced a bulb. My hyacinths linger in the cupboard under the sink in their bulb glasses, sulkily spouting a few fitful half-submerged stubby blooms, or simply rotting. My carefully-cultured indoor narcissus bloom - about the same time the ones outdoors do. Sometimes later.

So I’d kind of given up on the idea of bulbs indoors. And that wasn’t what was in my mind as I went to my outdoor bulb pots, poking around to see what was up, and what looked as if it were going to flower this year.

But there, completely forgotten by me, was a plain black plastic pot I’d planted with four leftover ‘Golden Melody’ tulips, the ones that didn’t fit in the big pots. Even though I’d bought a hundred of them, I wasn’t going to throw them away-and in my neighborhood, planting in the ground constitutes throwing them away. If rot doesn’t get them, usually the gophers do. Tulip bulbs are like hot french fries for gophers.

Four tulip noses* were poking out just above the soil, sampling their first breath of spring air. I picked up the pot. It was just the size to try indoors, and I could put it in one of my ceramic cachepots. That is, I could do that if they hadn’t all chipped from being left out in the big freeze last December.

They hadn’t. I found a gold-yellow one, and put it on my kitchen table with the tulips in.

In the next week, I found out what a pleasure it is to really watch bulbs grow close up. I’d thought I was doing that outside; when bulbs are going, I check them at least every few days to see how they’re evolving. I kneel on the ground. I look at them from different angles. And when I photograph them, I find myself looking at them in even more ways.

But nothing beats living a few feet away from a growing bulbs. First, their shoots came up with astonishing rapidity; in a few days, they were inches taller than their kindred, out in the cold. I got to watch the whole show, the unfurling of the tight nose into a cylinder of leaves

which opens out to allow the green bud to slowly rise on its stalk. Its lips get tinged with color and then they part, letting out the petals in an explosion of yellow, the exact same yellow as the trumpets of my ‘Dutch Master’ daffodils, blooming outside by the door.

One tepal** even did that delightful and typical tulip thing: it sported into exuberant green feathering.

Tulips seem to enjoy changing themselves; if you grow them long enough, you will see one tulip out of a batch breaking away from the others with its own variation of colors and patterns. They have the verve of individualism. They’re not afraid to try something new.

Each day I look at my pot of tulips in yellow flower, thrusting up on sturdy stems unlike the weak, staked ones from the florist. I see them blooming in a place no tulip ever thought to grow. I look at them and see the history of a Mediterranean wildflower that was stolen by northerners and introduced into eugenic breeding programs, its looks changed out of all recognition over the centuries, until a small part of its descendants came to me in a box that crossed an ocean and a continent.

I look at them and I think: yes. Spring will come.

*OK, confession time: the photo is not of that particular pot. Those of you who count will have noticed that. They’re other tulip noses I photographed that day.

**Tepals are a name for petals and sepals which look the same. Three of the tulip’s “petals” are actually sepals, while three are true petals. The layer of sepals is outside the layer of petals, and in many flowers the sepals are green and of a different texture from the petals. But in some flowers, like tulips, the sepals morph into a form so like the petals that it’s hard to tell them apart. I learned this in horticulture class so I just had to put it somewhere. I never cease to be amazed at how plants tweak themselves into so many colors and shapes.