Laughing Ravens

At the end of the day, what needs to be written about bulbs? Every garden has some. Every gardener has their favorite. There's always some bulb which fails to perform as illustrated in the catalog or website. So why bother writing about them? It's been done to death. Every garden writer has extolled the virtues of bulbs. For me, bulbs are the gateway drug. Not a huge investment in money or time, or even for that matter space in the garden... you get an enormous return. Most importantly, you see the payoff at the most crucial time of the year, during the grey/mud season of spring. Without bulbs, spring is spent waiting for trees to leaf out and for perennials to wake up. Bulbs give us that splendid wake up call, announcing "Spring can now begin!" For a little more than ten bucks you can get one heck of a thrill! Years ago, we planted a few chionodoxa and scilla siberica in a long bed. They performed well. Life happened, and the bed became ignored. Health issues arose. ...

    crocus (macro)   What does it mean to "have enough"?  I used to buy a few of something. A few bulbs, a handful of annuals, a couple perennials. Why? Mostly because we were broke, just starting a family, the usual reasons for a young couple. But our scarcity mindset came from not having a clue. What does one crocus look like? What does twenty look like in that same space? Bit by bit, I came to realize what thrived in our little garden.  Now I see crocuses in a completely different light. I dont want one. I want hundreds. I want the ground to be blanketed in rich yellows and creams, whites punctuated with saturated royal purples. And I want to feel that color fill the air. Somehow the radiant color makes the mornings warmer. The buzzing of bees is slow and unpracticed after winter dormancy.    It's easy to want winter to hurry up so that spring can begin. Spring seldom lasts very long. There's always that pressure to dive straight into summer. Hurry...

Not sure if this was iris reticulata 'Harmony' or 'Pixie' iris reticulata 'Purple Hill' 'Blue Hill' among species crocus   Anything I could write about iris reticulata would pale in comparison to their awesome beauty. So instead, here are a few images from the past few years.   For such a tiny flower, they have the biggest punch! A few days ago, I wrote that early spring bulbs are the punk rockers of the spring garden. Art school dropouts with dyed hair, ready to get into a fight over who is hardier, in the middle of a snowstorm.   About twenty-ish years ago, we planted our first hundred iris reticulata, courtesy of Van Engelen . Talk about enabling! When you have a hundred of anything, you start thinking bigger. After you've planted a hundred bulbs, you ask yourself... what if I had four hundred more? What could I do with a huge wave of purple moving through the garden?   I should try to capture the wave of blue from atop a tall ladder or maybe...