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Chapter 1: Year-round Windowsill Splendor
by Janet Marinelli
Come February, I've just about had it with winter. The gray skies, the bone-chilling cold, the dearth of foliage and flowers -- they really start getting me down. A few years ago I found the perfect antidote. I began growing bulbs indoors. Now, even when a blizzard is raging outside, my rooms are anything but bleak. Bright red and yellow tulips, golden daffodils and fragrant hyacinths dispel the winter blahs. And they're a lot easier on the pocketbook than a Caribbean vacation!
Obviously I'm not the only one who's discovered the pleasures of forcing bulbs for winter blooms. Fall gardening catalogs are chock full of choices, from dainty snowdrops to stately lilies to quirky fritillarias. And you don't have to be a yankee like me to appreciate their charms. Even southerners can enjoy the blossoms of these same hardy bulbs, which would not survive outdoors in their gardens.
There's a certain poetic justice in the fact that bulbs help free us from the restrictions of our climates, because they've evolved to survive an astonishing array of adverse conditions in theirs. All bulbous plants, technically called geophytes by botanists, are able to store food in stems, modified leaves or roots. This allows them to overcome potential limits to their growth such as periods of extreme cold, extended drought or searing heat. They simply go dormant, "lying low" for a while until more favorable conditions return. Then they draw on the reserves of food they stored up during the previous growing season to send up new leaves and flowers.
I became so fond of these spunky plants that I moved on from forcing hardy bulbs for a head start on spring to growing tender bulbs from tropical and subtropical climes of South Africa, Central and South America and Asia. Some of these beauties -- clivia and freesias, for example -- mostly native to South Africa, bloom in winter. Others, such as achimenes, flower in summer. Some, like Eucharis grandiflora, the Amazon lily, begin blooming in the fall. Which means by carefully choosing both hardy and tender species and staggering forcing times, you can orchestrate an indoor succession of blooms longer than that of any herbaceous flower r.
Working with Bob Hays, Mark Fisher and Scott Canning, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden experts who put together the encyclopedias of hardy and tender bulbs that follow, has introduced me to a whole slew of new bulbs that I can't wait to try, like Eucrosia bicolor, with its orange tubular-shaped flowers with elegant long, protruding stamens.
To create a beautiful indoor bulb garden, all you need to do is to simulate the conditions in the plants' native habitats. And so this handbook begins with a look at bulbous plants -- not only true bulbs but also corms, rhizomes and tubers -- their native environments and life cycles. Additional chapters explain in detail both how to coax the glorious spring-flowering types to bloom ahead of schedule and how to grow the tender bulbs that actually do best indoors for most American gardeners. A comprehensive list of suppliers will help you get your hands on even the most hard-to-find bulbs.
You'll never regret being house-bound again.
Janet Marinelli, co-editor of this handbook, is Director of Publishing at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the author of two books that explore the frontiers of ecological design: The Naturally Elegant Home and Your Natural Home, both published by Little, Brown and Company. She is also editor of two Brooklyn Botanic Garden handbooks: Going Native: Biodiversity in Our Own Backyards and The Environmental Gardener.