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Venturing Beyond the Familiar: Classic and Unusual Bulbs for Your Spring Garden
by Beth Hanson
By coincidence, it's early spring as I wrap up this book, and this year I'm especially attuned to the earth's reawakening. Although the overall mood of winter persists, with gray skies and barren leafless trees, I've already spotted hillsides blushing purple with crocus, daffodil stems poking through the brown leaves, and in protected spots the pale buds of hyacinths and the undulating leaves of tulips pushing up to the sun.
Plant a variety of spring-blooming bulbs in the fall and they will delight you from the bleak days of late winter to the onset of summer.
Like fluffy chicks, chocolate bunnies, and Easter bonnets, the appearance of these bulbs is so often cited as the signal that spring has returned that they have entered the realm of, well, cliche. These tried-and-true spring-blooming bulbs are members of a large and diverse group of plants called geophytes—corms, tubers, rhizomes, and true bulbs—all plants that have evolved underground parts to store the energy they need to reemerge when the weather warms. Like its companion volume, Summer-Blooming Bulbs, this handbook is an invitation to gardeners across the continent to venture beyond the familiar and explore this wide-ranging group of plants.
The heart of this book is an encyclopedia of spring-blooming bulbs in which about 50 spring beauties, from the beloved to the unusual, are profiled. No matter where you live, you will find bulbs that will thrive in your garden. Consult this section to learn about the cultural needs of each plant and how best to offset its individual attributes by combining it with other bulbs, perennials, annuals, shrubs, and trees. Elsewhere in these pages you will dig into the biology of bulbs, learn techniques for growing spring bloomers in containers, read about natural pest and disease controls for these plants, and more.
It's important to note here that the search for the new and unusual can have unintended consequences. Hundreds of thousands of bulbs are collected in the wild each year and sold to the nursery trade, and in the process natural populations of bulbs are depleted and pushed to the brink of extinction. However, it is possible to enjoy these charming plants in our gardens and ensure their survival in their natural habitats. The Chilean blue crocus, Tecophilaea cyanocrocus, for example, is one bulb that gardeneres have helped save from extinction. It is believed to have disappeared altogether from its native habitat, temperate grasslands near Santiago, Chile, and to survive only in small numbers in gardeners' greenhouses and plots. Biologists have devised a plan to propagate the Chilean blue crocus using this horticultural stock and reintroduce it to its former habitat.
Beth Hanson is former managing editor of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 21st Century Gardening Series. She is the editor of the BBG handbooks Summer-Blooming Bulbs (2001), Gourmet Herbs (2001), Natural Disease Control (2000), Chile Peppers (1999), and Easy Compost (1997), and contributed to BBG's Gardener's Desk Reference (Henry Holt, 1998). She lives outside New York City and writes about gardening, health, and the environment for various publications.
Photo: Charles Marden Fitch