Cold Climate Gardening

As befits a good garden buddy, I gave some colchicum bulbs to my friend Bub several years ago. As a matter of fact, every time I dig up and divide a new kind, I give her some, so by now she has at least three kinds. But she’s never bought any herself, so all that she has originally came from me.

The strange thing is, she now has a type that I don’t have. In the photo above, the wider petaled flower in the upper left is what I would call Colchicum byzantinum. In the middle you can see some intermediate width petals, and all the way to the right, some really skinny-petaled blossoms. Below is a second photo which, while slightly out of focus, makes the petal difference quite clear.

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When I was growing up, there was a game show on tv called “To Tell the Truth.” The various contestants tried to trick the game show panelists into thinking they were the true zoo veterinarian or whatever weird occupation was featured that day.

Sometimes I think my colchicums are trying the same trick on me. Oh, I can tell they’re all colchicums, all right, but is each one the cultivar it’s supposed to be?

On the left, we have Colchicum ‘Autumn Herald.’ On the right, C. ‘Violet Queen.’

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Colchicums as a whole are pretty miraculous, emerging from out of nowhere and blooming without leaves, but this particular variety (Colchicum agrippinum) takes the cake. I planted it in autumn of 2004. It didn’t bloom then, and it failed to send up leaves in 2005. Not surprisingly, it didn’t bloom in 2005, either. When it didn’t send up leaves last spring, I had given it up for dead, a mail-order stillborn.

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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 …

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Perhaps you’ve read it in the sidebar. In one of the random quotations I quote my friend Chan:

I am instinctively suspicious of any garden writer (or gardener) who is insufficiently fretful.

You don’t worry about your garden if you don’t care about it. And if you do care, you fret. At the beginning of the season, you wonder if your plants made it through. (By the way, White Flower Farm has a good article on late-emerging plants.) Mid-summer, you might be anxious about the effects of drought, or the bugs on your rose bush, or the way the leaves are yellowing on your phlox.

Earlier this spring I was fretting about my Colchicum autumnale. All my other colchicums had foliage …

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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!

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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.

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