Category — Garden plans

My vision of ‘Apricot Beauty’ and ‘Dreaming Maid’  was based on memory. And, as so often, memory was faulty.

I still see Dreaming Maid and Apricot Beauty as totally gorgeous. But I had imagined them in a harmony that was never meant to be.

The last time I grew Dreaming Maid (I know cultivar names are properly in single quotes, but I think they look stupid sprinkled densely through a post, as if the entire top of a pepper shaker had come off and dumped in more spice than was necessary or desirable)  – the last time I grew Dreaming Maid, I hadn’t yet started photographing my plants. I did remember, though, that when someone gave me a branch of lilac flowers, the two harmonized perfectly, shades of the same soft bluish lavender-purple.

I combined the memory of that color with the beautiful peach-and-pink shades of Apricot Beauty (sparked with its occasional flecks of green and rose), and came up with a beautiful dream of tulips, a river with lavender and peach currents.

But while they look fine together – it would be hard to find two pastel tulips that didn’t -  their colors don’t set each other off.

Part of this is due to the changing nature of Dreaming Maid, which starts out rosy-purple.

It isn’t until the very end, when it’s getting crepey, that it evolves into something more like the hazy lavender of my memory. It could be that there’s a soil difference makes a difference in its colors, too. My last batch of Dreaming Maid was planted in the ground; these are in containers. I can’t do the lilac test, because this year, these tulips are way ahead of lilac blooms; lilacs are just leafing out).

Apricot Beauty also changes, although the way it changes seems to vary with the seasons. Sometimes it’s pinker, but that can happen either at the start of its life

or towards the very end. Sometimes it’s a yellower orange, but that can happen either at the end of its life

or the very beginning. The only thing it does consistently is to get paler as it ages.

While Apricot Beauty isn’t actively bad with Dreaming Maid, the two aren’t complementary, to my eyes.

I’m sure this has something to do with the color wheel; if there are any artist readers who can explain this better, I’d appreciate it. When I put my much yellower-orange ‘Apricot Emperor’ tulip next to the gently aging Dreaming Maid, the two set each other off much better than the combination I’d planned.

But Apricot Emperor and Dreaming Maid is not a combination I can expect to see again in my lifetime, since Apricot Emperor is an early Fosteriana tulip. This year, perhaps because of our weird dry warm winter through December and January, the garden bulbs have come out higgledy-piggledy, in any order, crocuses and hyacinths blooming with early and even mid-season tulips, while the Fosterianas, generally next after daffodils, have come out with the usually-much-later single early tulips.

I’m hoping my late orange-and-purple tulip combination, ‘Orange Favorite’ and ‘Queen of the Night’ (with a few ‘Paul Scherer’ thrown in (see what I mean about all those single quotes?)) will turn out better.

As for now? Sometimes the material world surprises us with more than we had expected; other times it disappoints us of our glowing visions. I had the beautiful dream, and now I have beautiful (though mismatched) tulips.

“Don’t plant tender plants until the blackberries bloom in your yard,” said a local market farmer. We were standing in the post office lobby, where I’d been discussing the weather with someone else.

Last-frost dates are always a matter of controversy. That’s mainly because the weather has never learned how to read a calendar. Probably isn’t even interested in trying. Leaving us humans arguing. “It’s May 15th.” “No it’s not, it warms up by the end of April.” “Well, I remember one year when it snowed in the beginning of June.” And so forth. These conversations can go on for a very long time.

While I’ve always held to the May 15th theory, myself, I immediately recognized that “when the blackberries are blooming in your yard” is a much more accurate measure. I mean, I’m not silly enough to think that summer actually starts on June 21st–in my area it starts much earlier. Natural signals–the peeper frogs are peeping, the blackbirds are back, the snow has melted, the mosquitoes are out, the oaks are leafing–are a much better guide to the seasons. The real seasons, not the ones humans make up.

And “blooming in your yard” is even better. (We won’t go into how a lot of people here would rather blackberries didn’t bloom in the yard, because they are a spreading pestiferous impenetrable nuisance.) Every area has microclimates: small climates-within-climates that are formed by being by the cool creek or on the hot south-facing slope or any number of things that make your place cooler or warmer than another place just down the street. In cities, the amount of heat-holding cement around you can make the temperature higher by 10 degrees F (about 12 degrees C).

We need specific signals to the seasons, because it’s just too easy for humans to go off on a fantasy that we’ve really got it all under control. If we want to plant right now, it will work, we figure – because we want to do it right now. It’s a pretty thought that disguises our own troubled relationship with the the rest of nature.

So we may know, in our heads, that tomatoes, squash, and other plants can’t tolerate frost. But when it warms up in early spring, it’s hard to restrain ourselves from putting out all our plants and seeds. It’s so warm. Surely it will never freeze again. That devil blend of hope and hubris that’s led so many of us to disaster.

I think some of this comes from a feeling that our gardens are our own private universes, where (of course) we hold sway. In a way, our gardens are are private universe. But they are also a part of the world around us. Maybe because I came to gardening from hanging out outside, I have always included the rest of nature in my garden notebook: the cranes flew over, the willows are leafing, the moon’s in the last quarter. But I still miss a lot.

Our local farmer said he learned about the blackberry-flower method from the old-timers thirty-seven years ago. If I had used my eyes, I could have worked it out at least a couple of decades ago. You could be quicker than I was: what are some natural signals for your own planting times?

For that full fluffy look, garden books caution, hyacinths need to be replaced every five years. Myself, I think hyacinths are just getting good after five years. They get the way I like my jeans: worn in, graceful, softer: more comfortable in the woods.

I can’t help wondering if I’m supposed to admire those fat, flower-stuffed hyacinths because they’re more productive, more more more: they did get developed in approximately the same age as colonialism, and reached their heights in the U.S.  in the prime of our industrial age, the late 1800s and early 1900s. A time when “more more more” was certainly the cry of the land, if that cry has ever faded, and too bad about what happens in the context of all that production.*

To me, hyacinths fit the landscape much better (even in pots) when they fine down; instead of stiff fat spires suggesting civic plantings, they turn into newly-introduced woodland creatures. As an extra bonus, none of the other woodland creatures has ever eaten my hyacinths.

Once hyacinths get to the point of pleasant woodsiness, they seem to stay there. At least the older varieties like my pink ‘Lady Derby’ do.  I’ve had them for over ten years, mostly in containers, and they just keep coming back.

L’Innocence, another heirloom hyacinth,  is beautiful, I think, even when it’s fined down to this:

Some of my white L’Innocence have kept a heavier supply of their white curlicues, perhaps the ones that get more sun? You can see some of them in the picture at the top of this post.

Festival (sometimes called Festiva) hyacinths have that sparsely woodsy look from the get-go. They’re designed that way, worthy heirs of the old Roman hyacinths which had the same form, several small spikes curving gracefully. (They’re also called multi-flowered hyacinth.)

You can find true Roman hyacinths at Old House Gardens, specializers in heirloom bulbs. While they’re not cheap, Roman hyacinths are meant to go on indefinitely, blooming year after year and even spreading. Modest flowers often do last longer, I’ve noticed. Probably because they’re nearer the species types and further from ones that are bred for professional flower growers, who tend to be geared toward a big one-time show instead of  steady stamina in the garden.

I haven’t invested in Roman hyacinths yet, mainly because I’m happy with my White Festivals, which I’ve neglected shamefully; I put them in the ground near the door, and basically ignored them since then. I don’t even think they got the fertilizer I usually give to my bulbs, since they were not in a spot where other bulbs were. I often neglected to fertilize them in spring for that reason, and of course by fall I have only the vaguest notion of where they are.

But even neglected, they fine down beautifully. To me, this hyacinth looks very like some of the native woodland bulbs we have here: small, unassuming, beautiful. It fits into the landscape almost seamlessly. And this is important to me. I’m not a purist, but if my writing could do what I want it to do, it would remind us all to look up from the garden plans occasionally, look at the bigger world we’re gardening in, and see how we can enter into conversation with it.

*such as grinding poverty, child labor, dangerous work conditions with no health care or insurance, open-pit mines, clearcutting, incredible amounts of pollution, and the general ascendancy of money over kindness, thoughtfulness, and community connections. Sadly, these are both old customs and part of the modern work ethic, but they became institutionalized in the slave workforces of monocropping colonialism, and the social upheaval of early industrialism.

I’d actually intended that this combination planter would be tulip ‘Gypsy Love’ with crocus ‘Gypsy Girl’. But as life would have it, the ‘Gypsy Love’ tulips had either died out some time ago or, in a night of passion, thrown their label into an entirely different pot. Instead, I’d planted the hyacinth ‘Gypsy Queen’   These are some of the problems a literary-minded gardener faces.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have planted a crocus with a hyacinth: the bloom times are just too close. Fortunately, ‘Gypsy Queen’ is always the latest of my hyacinths to bloom, so I may just squeak by with this combination.

Meanwhile, over in the ‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’ pot,  the mix with Ornithogalum nutans ‘Silver Bells’ is working out more the way I’d imagined. Little tufts of ornithogalum (I’d thought they were crocus before I looked at the label; I haven’t grown ornithogalum before) have popped up amid the sturdy stems and leaves of Rijnveld.

Up on top, it looks like this:

 As usual, bloom time has not been the only consideration in making these combinations (well, in making one and having one made for me). Plant height is something that needs to be kept in mind, and I’m still experimenting with that one.  It’s easy to see that the hyacinths will have no trouble rising above the little crocuses, but I’m not sure if the ornithogalum will suffer from the shade of looming daffodils. Time will tell.

Another consideration is the requirements of the bulbs you’re planting together. All of these bulbs come from the Mediterranean, where they have the same rainless summers we do here. So I plant them in containers that get no water in summer; after the bulbs die, I drag the containers out back where the foliage can die in peace, and leave them, except for fertilizing and transplanting, until next spring.

Planting two kinds of bulbs in one container not only saves me buying more containers; it also means I don’t have to drag containers to the back until I get the second show. (I can move them off the porch, though, to give room to something more spectacular, until the second flush of flowers presents itself.  Then I shuffle the pots around again.) When the hyacinth and ornithogalum bloom,  I’ll be taking pictures of them in with their defunct buddies. So far, these are two combinations that seem to be working – even if one of them is an accident.

Every fall I have more bulbs than I have pots, so every fall I compute the relative blooming time and size of bulbs in an attempt to cram as many bulbs as possible in each pot, and buy as few pots as possible.  Every pot with large bulbs in it has room at the top for small bulbs, if you can work the combinations and the bloom times right. Then you get two shows from the same container.

Hyacinths are big bulbs, buried deep, but I’d always considered them to be so early that there was no point in planting anything in with them. Planting hyacinths with something else was equally problematic: hyacinths are too big to put in with tulips, they’d get in each other’s way.  You can’t put them with lilies, because the lilies will want water later in the season, and the hyacinths need to be dry.  So I just planted hyacinths by themselves.

The older hyacinth varieties I grow perennialize really well for me, so I had a number of pots with open real estate, as it were, if only I could figure out how to use it. In the last few years, I’d been experimenting with more small, early-spring bulbs, and it gradually dawned on me that some of them bloomed significantly before hyacinths. So they could get their flowers out without being overshadowed by looming hyacinth foliage. At least that was what I hoped

The suspense is gone out of this narrative, because the picture at the top of the post shows you it’s working. But the experiment has also unfolded another, unphotographed, secret of succession.

‘Katherine Hodgkins’ came out this year just as Iris danfordiae was fading. Since I’d just planted the I. danfordiae this year, and Katherine Hodgkins is in its second year, they may bloom farther apart next year. (Bulbs tend to come up later in their first season than they do in subsequent years – assuming they last.)

That means I’m making progress in my attempts to line up a couple of months’ worth of irises.  So far, I have Sylvia’s Iris unguicularis  ‘Mary Bernard’, which will bloom in winter, well before Iris danfordiae. ( Iris reticulata might fit between the two.) Then comes ‘Katherine Hodgkin’. I still need to fill in the gaps, never mind sorting out the later-blooming bulbous iris types to keep irises in my garden as long as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll need to work out how to keep them perennial. This is a project that could keep me happy for years.