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Bulbs
Stories that are specifically about flowering bulbs, corms, rhizomes, and more. You know, the ones we plant one season and forget about until they magically appear months later.
Books by Gayla Trail
Narcissus ‘Avalon’ ‘Dickcissel’
You want a food post today. I can feel it. I had every intention to post a photo of something edible that I am growing this year but then photos of this creamy, soft daffodil came up, and how much longer can I talk about daffodils when they are so very nearly on the way out?
The daffodils are fleeting. I have found myself jumping between favorites as they have rolled out their blooms. This is the one I currently favor.
I love it here, paired with Artemisia vulgaris ‘Oriental Limelight’.
Well done Mr. Parker. Well done.
Update: You’ll notice that I got the variety wrong. I don’t believe ‘Avalon’ is a miniature, and I didn’t realize these qualified as a miniature. Time passes since a picture is taken and you forget about size unless they’re really tiny like these guys.
Leave a commentSunlit Crocus
Has the spring been moving along too quickly in your area? Around here the warm weather has accelerated everything so that plants have been making their appearance and blooming faster than any year I can recall. The spring ephemerals are the worst of the bunch — they’re up and gone before I’ve barely had a chance to process them.
Don’t get me wrong, I am in love with the season and have been in a semi-blissed-out state through it all. It just means that everything has been rush, rush, and mania. There is the rush to catch the flowers before they are gone, the rush to take photos, the rush to get the garden prepped, and then planted in due course. Somewhere in there I am supposed to write about it. I can’t keep up! You should see the roof garden right now. It’s a disaster of pots and plants scattered willy-nilly.
All of that to explain why I can no longer recall which variety of crocus this is. I think it might just be more ‘Ruby Giant’ but so much time has passed and so many plants have come and gone since I took this photo.
My brain is simply overloaded. Although in a good way.
Leave a commentMiniature Daffodils
“I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodils”
- William Wordsworth
I’m getting quite an education in narcissus this year. Although, not just in the botanical sense, come to think of it. Har har.
It seems that as I familiarize myself with the various types, sizes, shapes, and colours that are out there, my attentions have been turning more towards the teeny, tiny, diorama-sized daffodils, like this Narcissus juncifolius I came upon the other day growing in the rock garden section of the Montreal Botanical Gardens. These bright little flowers were one of the highlights of my trip and I spent quite a lot of time documenting them with various cameras.
According to “Gardener’s Latin,” the species name juncifolius refers to the leaves, which are thin and cylindrical like the a grassy rush, aka juncus.
I offer you this photo of one of the flowers next to Davin’s thumb so that you can get a better gauge of their scale.
Tiny but eye-catching.
Leave a comment‘Ruby Giant’ Crocus
I love this little-big flower, Crocus tommasinianus ‘Ruby Giant.’ The name is confusing here (if not a bit of a stretch) as it speaks to the flower size in relation to others in its species rather than within the crocus world as a whole. It is actually a cute little cup of a thing, much smaller than the big hybrids you see available as a forced potted bulb this time of year.
It is so graceful with its long, stretching neck and petals that open wide in the sun. I took this photo on a cheerfully bright afternoon last week and it was a delight to see them in exactly the same state today, nearly a week later.
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