Cold Climate Gardening

No, it’s not the Invasion of the Subterranean Aliens. These are emerging colchicum flowers. Col-chi-what? An underused flowering bulb from the Lily family, which hold a fascination for me that I really can’t explain. I never would have discovered them, had they not been growing here when we moved in. Their botanical weirdness of blooming leafless in the fall with a tube of petal-like tissue passing for a stem, while their leaves and seedpods are a spring-only event, is certainly part of the attraction. Locating new varieties is also part of the fun, similar to scoring a find at a flea market.

But part of the enjoyment of them …

As you may be aware, the Northeast has been getting rained on for most of October. The rainy, warmer-than-typical October coming after the unusually hot and dry summer has made for some unusual plant activity:
Many of the plants that went dormant or semi-dormant in the heat came back and produced another flush of bloom. Most notably, the tunic flower that I thought had died is regrowing. Yay!

How could this happen? After explaining to Zoey in the comments of this post what colchicums were, I realized I had never shown what the foliage looks like. It’s not exactly breathtaking, so I don’t have many photos of it to share. I had to scan in this photo, which was taken in my very first spring here (1990). I’m sure I took it with the hopes that I might someday be able to identify the foliage. You can see one clump of strap-like daffodil leaves, which are about full height, and the broader leaves of the colchicum leaves behind them. This should give you an idea of the scale of the foliage. Keep in mind the flowers are about the size of crocus blossoms. (As with almost all images on this blog, click on the small photo to get a much bigger one.)

Now this second photo is a bit more interesting.I don’t often get to see this, myself. It is the seed pod of the colchicum flowers that bloomed the previous autumn. This is why one supposedly common name of colchicums is Sons-Before-the-Fathers. In a calendar year, the seeds show up before the flowers do. This is because the ovary, the seed forming part of the flower, is actually located at the base of the perianth tube, just underground. The peri-what? you ask. What looks like the stem of the flower is actually a tube of petal-like tissue, and the seed making parts of the flower that in a rose, for example, would be right below the blossom, are actually in the bulb underground. The ovary, now containing the seeds, is brought above ground in the spring when the leaves emerge.

This is my first colchicum of the year. It appears the Bookish Gardener beat me, as she is displaying a whole clump to my single blossom. To my eye, they are the same plant: Colchicum byzantinum. To your eye, the colors of the two flowers are different; her image is more accurate. Also, you can’t see inside my flower, but eventually it will look like her photograph. That’s how all my byzantinums look on the inside. For those of you unfamiliar with this genus, I suggest you browse through the Colchicum category linked on the sidebar. I’m afraid I won’t have time …

I am determined to wrap up the colchicum season in a timely manner and get my colchicum books out of the dining room, where they’ve been banging around near the computer for easy reference. There is only one colchicum still blooming, and that is ‘Waterlily.’ She is always the last, and often looks the worse for it, because usually by now we’ve had continual hard frosts for most of October, and this has been a wonderfully mild autumn. ‘Waterlily’ is looking good this year.

Of the eight different colchicums I ordered this year, two have not emerged: Colchicum agrippinum and Colchicum autumnale. This has happened to me before. Sometimes they are just not blooming size yet, or didn’t take kindly to …

This is the white form of Colchicum speciosum which, just as with the white form of byzantinum, is called ‘Album.’ Like the typical speciosum, the flower is taller and larger than the typical byzantinum, and not nearly as generous with its blossoms, at least this year. They’re elegant and demure, above the kind of flopsy behavior of their byzantinum cousins, but more able to compete for attention with the larger plants in the garden.

You want one, you know you do.

Some of you may recall that my first acquistion of Colchicum byzantinum ‘Album’ was an impostor. This beauty is undoubtedly the real thing. Not only is it white, but it has the same structure of petals and general floriferous character of the species. I just received and planted this earlier this autumn from Odyssey Bulbs, and it bloomed like a well-established clump. I had thought the first photo was as good as it was going to get, but I was pleasantly surprised. Whoever edited the Colchicum species …