Category — Bulbs

I feel a special satisfaction looking at these snow-capped pots of bulbs. Not only did I get all my bulbs in before it snowed; I also got them all fertilized, old and new. My bulbs are nicely tucked up under their coverlets.

How did it happen that I, practiced procrastinator and taker-on of too many projects that are left undone, burier of bulbs in freezing rain and snow – how did it happen that I did this in perfect timing?

I think it had to do with listening. It’s something every gardener, naturalist, or farmer comes to learn: listening to that quiet inner voice that says: do this now.

This year I actually did that. I listened to the voice that said, no matter what my desires, a small bulb order was the best thing for this year. So I got what (for me) amounts to a modest fall bulb order: 150 tulips, 10 fritillaries, 10 iris bucharica. Bulbs are incredibly beautiful, but don’t ever let anyone tell you that they aren’t work to plant.

Maybe it’s the way they say birth-labor is: once you see the beautiful results, you forget all that went before. But this year I remembered that when I buy hundreds of bulbs, it isn’t just more beauty: it’s also more pots, more potting soil, more amendments. And more planting time.

So this year, I remembered to get a smaller amount of bulbs (especially since I was ordering late in the year). And I did all the other work in small increments. I bought the soil one day and name tags one day, bought pots another. I thought about where everything would go: some of my early gregii tulip bulbs got put in the top of pots already filled with late tulips. (If you’re interested in more details, check out my succession planting posts.) By the time the gregii tulips are ungracefully fading, the bigger parrot and lily tulips will overshadowing their dying foliage (hopefully not enough to keep it from getting the sun it needs to make gregii bulbs for next year).

And then, when the weather and the day gave me hints, I planted, not all at once, but in small amounts; pouring in soil and amending it here, tucking in fritillaries with sages there, adding the early bulbs to the tops of old bulbs two or three pots at a time. I never worked more than ten to twenty minutes at once, and unlike other years, I wound up planting when it was actually comfortable to be outside and my hands didn’t freeze.

It’s got me wondering about the frenetic activity of former years. What would have happened if I’d listened to all those hints from wind, weather, moon, sun and experience before, instead of insisting on the big rush with the biggest possible amount of bulbs?

mysterious Apricot Beauty

Those of you who read here regularly may have noticed that I’ve been slacking off lately.Life has a way of interfering with blogging, sometimes, and I’ve been going through one of those times.But what better way to bring this blog back to life than to talk about that other resurrection, those brown dry bulbs that turn into flamboyant or shy beauties that can send a moribund mood into happy orbit? Of course, I’m talking about tulips.Yes, the time to think about tulips is NOW.Because if you want this (or something like it) next spring

brilliant yellow West Point, backed up by Purissima tulip and Hawera narcissus

you must get your bulbs NOW. And you must plant them soon.Why should you plant tulips?Because they’re one of the best mood elevators around, and you don’t have to worry about liver failure or kidney damage to use them.Because they are incredibly beautiful, and life can’t have too many beautiful things.Because they can be beautiful like delicate wildflowers

 Tulipa bataalinii Apricot Jewel. Not quite a species, but close.or the most flamboyant  notes of spring

Generaal de Wet, an heirloom with a musky scent that fills the atmosphere

and everything in between.

white sport of Creme Upstar

Because tulips sales have gone down in this country (even before the economy did. Could one have to do with the other?). We need to support beauty in our yards, our neighborhoods, our public gardens. Beauty makes people better. It even cuts down on crime.Because (if you live in a climate that gets at least some freeezes) they are one of the easiest possible things you can grow.Because you can grow tulips anywhere, even in unexpected places.

Apricot Beauty, again

Because they are beautiful, come rain

Queen of the Night – no garden should be without it

or come shine.

Tulipa bataalinii Bright Gem

Because they change from beauty to beauty, from the shy opening in the morning

Yellow-and-white Sweetheart tulip, with Lady Jane in the background

to the soul-baring midday spread.

Purissima (or White Emperor), a tulip that can last for twenty years in the garden

Because even if your garden is a doorstep or balcony, a container of tulips will bring you the thrill of the first sprout

the new bud

the opening flower

.

yes, that’s Apricot Beauty again. I’m a little sick on the subject of Apricot Beauty.

and a flower that changes beautifully in the course of its life, gorgeous to the end.

Also a little sick on the subject of Queen of the Night – can you blame me?

If you want ideas on what varieties to get, you can enter “tulips” in the search engine on this site, and get many many writeups, from my Tulipomania week and from all the other times I could sneak in a tulip post.If you want ideas on where to get tulips, this link will take you to the first of a series of 5 posts where I laid bare my feelings about my favorite bulb catalogs.If you’re feeling strapped for cash, be sure to check out “13 Ways to Get Your Tulips to Come Back”  before you order. The first item on the list is choosing the right varieties; some come back more easily than others (check the note below the picture of Purissima, above). Pick the right ones, and you may have a show for years to come.Another way to save cash is to wait for the end-of-season sales. Since these don’t start until November, that means you have to live in a place where the ground doesn’t freeze hard by then. Another caveat is that your selections will be limited. On the other hand, that also means that you don’t have to make so many decisions, a good thing for the weak-willed. (Being weak-willed, I am going the end-of-season-sale route myself this year. I have so many hundreds of bulbs, and I want so many hundreds more – I need all the help I can get. Short of actually stopping buying bulbs, of course.)If you want more inspiration, try Dianne Benson’s paeon to tulips at DirtierOr just take a good look at the pictures in this post, or in a catalogue, or on a bulb-selling website, and imagine that greeting you at your door next spring.

The earliest U.S. garden writers promoted gladiolas: how easy they are to grow, how they multiply like crazy and give you lots of return on your investment.

In modern times, we tend to leave propagation to the professionals, but there’s no need to do that, especially not with something as easy to propagate as glads.

In fact, propagating glads is not only easy, it’s fun. Digging up corms has an Easter-egg-hunt excitement. How many little corms will there be?

In the case of glads, as you can see, there are often scads of little cormlets around the mother corm, which is supposed to die off each year. This mother, shiny, firm, and huger than any gladiolus corm I’ve ever planted, looks as if it will make a fine new plant in the coming year. It might be one of the glads that never flowered; often this means plants are putting more energy into their roots and leaves.

Talking about bulb propagation now may seem odd to those of you whose ground is soon to be frozen solid or covered with snow. But  bulb propagation is something that can happen in many seasons, depending on where you live. It should always be done when bulbs are dormant – but when they are dormant depends on what season they bloom. In my area, I can re-plant them right away; in colder-winter areas, you need to put the corms and cormlets up in onion bags or paper bags (they need some ventilation) in a dark, cool (but not freezing) place.

I get a certain pleasure out of seeing the baby corms, jammed in against the mother like piglets to a sow, some of them mere slivers, some of them already sending up leaf-shoots. It’s hard not to be happy when you see your garden plants have been working underground, making more plants for you.

I’d never tried propagating glads until now, though I have grown out some narcissus and tulip offsets – only a few to the flowering stage, but at least the rest give me leaves to show they’re still alive.  In the case of glads, I have no doubt that at least some of these bulbs will give me flowers as early as next year.  The small ones still need to grow.

‘Black Beauty’ isn’t really black. It is mysterious, though. Iwonder why its breeders decided to give it that name? Its dusky-wine-red coloring deserves credit on its own.

Nonetheless, I’m not about to quibble (much), because Black Beauty is a fine lily. Though it’s offered by Old House Gardens, it’s not really an heirloom lily, it just looks as if it should be. “We followed our hearts on this one,” says owner Scott Kunst. “As we talked about all the great heirloom bulbs we might celebrate, we kept coming back to how spectacular ‘Black Beauty’ is and saying ‘too bad it’s not that old or endangered.’ Finally we decided if we all loved it so much and thought it belonged in everyone’s garden, it didn’t really matter if it’s only 45 years old and not yet on the edge of doom.”

In different lights, the color of Black Beauty comes off lighter or darker. Since I’m a nut about the way the stamens come bursting out of the deep starlike cleft in its center, I take pictures of it in lots of different lights.

The back view has its own curvy complex beauty.

Black Beauty is a hybrid of two species, Lilium speciosum rubrum and  L. henryi. It was bred in 1957 from Leslie Woodriff, who specialized in crosses that people had thought were impossible.  Its breeding makes it an Orienpet, which is lilyspeak for an Oriental/Trumpet lily cross. Since neither of these species is a trumpet lily, I’m a little puzzled as to why, but that’s what the authorities say. We must bow to the authorities.

Dave’s Garden reports good results from growing this lily in zone 4; it’s also trouble-free in my zone 8 garden, where it takes weather from 15 degrees F to 105F without turning a hair. It does well for me in anything from pretty shady semishade to pretty sunny. It comes back after abuse (such as not watering too well), and, I just found out, it’s another unexpected hummingbird plant! (Yet another excuse for planting more lilies.)

Something I still haven’t captured to my satisfaction is the texture, which has subtly sparkling bits of light mixed with the smoothness and stubbly spots.

All this and fragrance, too.

Here I have to make a confession: I’m a lily freak, but I just don’t like Oriental lilies that much. The species, yes: the big honking hybrids – not really. I’ve tried, I really have. But Black Beauty, with its graceful species look, is the only Oriental hybrid I want in my garden.

I like hummingbirds, but I feel uneasy about giving them sugar water in feeders. For starters, sugar water doesn’t seem like good nutrition for them; for another, you have to be sure the sugar water is fresh and not fermented by heat. I’m sorry to say that I’m not the kind of person who can be trusted to remember and take care of that.

So one of the qualifiers for my garden list is flowers that will nourish birds, particularly hummingbirds.

I can’t say I’ve actually done a lot to attract hummingbirds, but I  accidentally chose two heirloom bulbs which are shaping up to be hummingbird plants par excellence. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get pictures while the hummingbirds were actually working them, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But hummingbirds did work both these flowers, with enthusiasm, and came back for more.

The one at the top of the page is ‘Atom’ glad.

I didn’t use to like glads. I associated them with those stiff spiky arrangements that put you off at formal events such as weddings and funerals.

Maybe that sterile association is what made me so surprised to see a hummingbird working my ‘Atom’ glads. I mean, they’re red, right? Hummingbird color? But I just never associated glads with nectar and pollinations, somehow.

But my bulbomania, and the enticing descriptions at Old House Gardens and Brent and Becky’s got me interested in glads. Especially the old-fashioned hybrids that used to be called primulus, from a species with more graceful, smaller spikes and hooded flowers. Though the catalogues don’t mention it, ‘Atom’ looks like one of these hybrids to me.

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t get a picture of a hummer on these glads: just never happened at the right moment. But they were faithful, if irregular, visitors. If you choose to plant this heirloom glad, you may get the same bonus.

‘Citronella’ lily was another surprise hummingbird attraction.

This is a hummingbird’s view of the flower. I hadn’t even thought of hummingbirds being attracted to a lily, much less a downfacing yellow one.  But the hanging lily heads gave me an extra-good show one morning as a hummingbird worked it: I could see the hummer fully, as it was hovering underneath the lily with only its beak stuck up into the flower. For a moment it stopped to rest on the lily stalk: it was only a little bigger than one of the buds. (My camera and I were parted that morning, so no pictures. Some things just need to hide in the magic of the moment.)

‘Citronella’ was bred by Jan de Graaf, in 1958. He was the first major lily breeder in the United States (before that, species lilies were grown in quantity, but there wasn’t a lot of hybridization). It’s an Asiatic lily, with parents L. davidii var. unicolor and L. amabile var. luteum. Ed McRae, one of the inheritors of de Graaf’s mantle, describes it as “pendant to outfacing golden yellows of exceptional form and beauty.”

Still, I was hesitant to get Citronella, since it isn’t fragrant, and in  my small garden I like it if every plant serves at least two purposes.

But I’ve come to trust de Graaf hybrids for their grace, and Citronella wasn’t too pricey, so I popped for some.

It turns out Citronella  does serve two purposes. One: it’s beautiful, and at least in its first year filled in that lily blank between the trumpets and the other kinds of lilies. Two: it’s hummingbird food, and a whole lot more nutritious than sugar water. Fun to watch, too.

I recommend both these bulbs as easy to grow, beautiful, and attractive to hummingbirds. Who knew?