Crocus Time
“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”
John Steinbeck
I love me some John Steinbeck, he seemed to have a deep connection with the marginalized, downtrodden and working class of the world. This quote seems to hit some nails on the head, as I was looking backwards in time through some of my very first bulb catalogs. I used to have a really large offering of Crocus species from many different locations and climates. I didn’t really notice it over time but for years that collection slowly diminished, as I would lose a species here or there. By the time I finally figured out what was going on I had lost many great selections, some of which exist in that elemental world of “unobtanium”. Especially given the dirth of seed collectors focusing on bulbs, especially to areas like Iran or the “stans”. Maintaining a vast collection of flower bulbs from around the world does require some constant vigils, attention to details like weather, watering, soils, pests, disease, etc. Many of those early years as a commercial flower grower, for me were spent operating illahe as a sundowner operation, or side hustle to my wage slave job as a government servant. This didn’t allow the luxury of paying as close attention as I should have been all those years. What had happened to the Crocus collection, was I had made a change in my potting soil, switching from hand harvested leaf mould as a source of organics to a more commercially available bulk product that I could buy by the yard, composted cow manure. While the nutrients were all there, the soil biology and the moisture capacity just wasn’t the same. At the same time I was treating all the Crocus collection to a long hot summer dormancy, with the summers getting hotter, I ran out of shade to keep the bulb pots in over summer and resorted to keeping them in the bulb house but covered with shade cloth. I eventually addded roll up sides to keep it cooler, but year after year the crocus return was less and less. Having kept a blog over the last 15 years, did allow me to eventually figure out what was going on. The combination of different soils, coupled with hotter drier summers, and the lack of a cool place to mitigate those summer temps on the bulbs was turning out to be particularly fatal for the Crocus species that grow naturally in cool, moist mountain meadows. These species often bloom as the snow is melting, fed by ice cold rivulets of water, then shaded through the short mountain summer by grasses and then plunged back into freezing as snow comes early to the high country. This was just not a reality I could manage in my spare time, given my resources and treating all the Crocus the same was having devastating consequences on the collection here at illahe.
Crocus gunae, blooming for the first time from seed sown in late 2021, early 2022. This species was collected in Golestan, Iran.
So I started to put the pieces together about 6 or seven years ago, and I decided although it would be difficult I would make serious effort to rebuild the waning Crocus collection. Especially those Montane species that are such a delight in the late winter period. I spent time procuring every species I could get from seeds as this is always my favorite way to start bulbs. While the wait can be long the reward is so worth it to watch a pot coming into bloom after years of babying those little seedlings along. Here we are a few years later and the fruits of those efforts are starting to yield. Check out the gallery for a few of these special little winter gems
I am especially fond of those species in the biflorus group, even if the botanists may split them on minute differences, I find some of them to be more tractable in cultivation and the differences in bloom time can make for a longer show in the winter bulb collection. It has been good thing to rebuild the collection and while it has a ways to go and probably some years before I have enough of these to offer on the list again. I have developed as a bulb grower and with the years has come knowledge that has helped me to take steps to better protect this precious collection. I recently wrote an article that I hope will be published in the Pacific Bulb Societies newsletter that goes in depth into the research and experimentation I made into a perfecting a potting soil for maintaining a diverse collection of bulbs. If you are not a member or even a visitor to the vast wealth of knowledge and information that the Pacific Bulb Society is, I would encourage you to check it out. Click here to visit the Pacific Bulb Society website
I think that over time, as a plantsman I am trying to look 3 percent into the past, ninety percent in the present and 7 percent into the future. Hopefully there will come a time when places like Iran are no longer headed by oppressive and tyrannical regimes and our own society has made peace and progression away from the pathways that lead to that. My hope is that someday we make peace with world at large and travel can happen without fences and borders and humans can go appreciate the flowers of another culture without fear. But for now I sit in my bulb house on a chilly January afternoon and watch the Crocus open and think what an amazing sight a mountain meadow filled with these lovely jewels of the snow melt might be like to experience in person.
Chilly nights, down into the bottom of the 20’s, sunny afternoons and hopefully some rain on the horizon!
Mark