Cold Climate Gardening

My mother and I have just done our fall pear canning, something we have done longer than I can remember, and I’m sure many other families in that house have done over the hundred years or so of the tree’s life. I played under its branches as a toddler and climbed in it when in grade school.
It is an early form of Bartlett I think (Did you know there are many different similar forms of most common fruit tree varieties? Tweaked to various climates & markets across the country by breeders & finders of sports.)-though it does not keep for more than about a week off the tree because the fruit is so sweet and totally …

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Sigh. Whenever I see this flower, I immediately think of a ballerina, slender and graceful, with a touch of pink. According to Russell Stafford, ‘Ordu’ is “the hardiest C.speciosum cultivar, named after the Turkish district whence it came.” And yet, I can’t help thinking of the enchantress Orddu from the Prydain Chronicles created by Lloyd Alexander, despite the fact that the flower and the book character are nothing alike. I keep feeling the flower was wrongly named.
This photo was taken on September 7th, and since then the color has deepened to the same shade as ‘Violet Queen,’ and three more blossoms have emerged. This characteristic of changing color …

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Colchicum ‘Violet Queen’ is also blooming now. It started a day or two after ‘Autumn Queen.’ Last year, ‘Violet Queen’ and ‘Autumn Herald’ bloomed at the same time. This year, VQ is blooming its head off, and AH has yet to make an appearance. I sure hope it’s not a goner. This year, I cut one blossom each of AQ and VQ, and yes, they are different. They both have the same bowl of white in the center, but AQ is tesselated, and to my eye, a deeper shade of the same color as VQ. In other words, if I was going to call one of them violet, it would be the one named ‘Autumn Queen,’ not the one named …

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This is the tiniest colchicum in my collection. I just got it in this autumn’s order from Odyssey Bulbs, and it was in full bud in the bag, a bit surprising since both Bowles and Russell Stafford say it blooms later than the straight species. I hope, as Stafford claims in his catalog copy, that it is indeed “a vigorous form, its abundance of bloom and rapidity of increase amply compensating for its relatively small flowers.” I am already thinking of moving it to the flower bed I showed you earlier. The petite white blossoms would fill in the gaps marvelously in the fall, but …

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“And it’s a sign of age I think, that I start the day planning to get 5 things done, end it with getting 2 things done, and end up feeling like I’ve done 12 things.”–Garden Djinn

Me, too, Jenn; me, too.

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It’s that time of year again–colchicum season. I thought that this year, in addition to talking about my new acquisitions, I would try to focus on the ones I didn’t get around to posting on last year, and avoid deluging you with photos unless they were clearly better than last year’s. And having thus firmly resolved not to bore you with colchicum tedium, I immediately discovered I wanted to make an exception.

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