(Spring) Crocus

Crocus

When I moved to NL 10 years ago, I was seriously missing... the snow. Back at home snow was often present from November till March, in all sorts of stages, starting as a lovely white fluff and ending up dirty, wet and crusty. While the first snow of a season always was a lovely event, by the New Year you generally got to loath it; and by Mardigrass you could not wait for the damn thing to be finally gone. Then, somewhere in the beginning of March, everything turned into a wet cold mire for at least a week; generally I tried to spend that time at home, observing from my warm(ish) perch how other people do swimming on ice. And then... an aesthetic nightmare! Piles of dog poop, brown grass, rotten goo of an unknown origin and other unpleasantness before the new greenery of the season covers (most of it) up.

Dutch winter often reminds me a bit of a Northern spring, although it is usually greener (the grass seldom gets really brown here) and cleaner (as all the junk does not accumulate in the snow for half of the year). By the looks we are wrapping up the last leftovers of the winter this year, and while, in theory, temperatures still can drop down in the last bit of February, I highly doubt they will.

Crocus

And that means.... BULB TIME! Something I am really looking forward to every year! The first and the obvious, of course, are crocus. There are so many varieties, that at some point I stopped noting the names and just went for the colors, sticking them all over the place.

Generally there are a few basic things to know about crocus. Most of them, with a very few exceptions, like to be planted in a sunny position, in a sandy (or gritty) well-drained soil, although they can also quite successfully grow in clay, as long as it does not get waterlogged. Especially it is important in their rest season: it is essential that they do not get over watered at that point. They are native to the areas with humid winter/spring and dry, hot summers, and because of those conditions they are adapted to go into dormancy in summer rather than in the winter. . It is also the reason why crocus are normally planted (and replanted) in the late summer or early autumn (both spring and autumn varieties), because at that point they start coming out of dormancy and grow new roots.

Crocus

Crocus also do not like to be fertilized, even in the poor soils, so a common mistake is to put them in the beds with other, fertilizer greedy, plants. However, they can grow quite well under the trees or shrubs, because their vegetation season is over before the trees leaf out and they do not care about the shade while they lay dormant. Commonly they also are planted in the lawns, but not all cultivars are suitable for that. It can become a hassle to maw a lawn in that case, because most of the time, especially with big bloom varieties, crocus are not done blooming when the lawn needs its first spring trim. It is also possible to grow crocus in the pots and planters, but those have to be stored in the dry place during the summer, and it can require a bit more skill than one could suspect. Crocus are not very eager to develop new bulbs (ok, officially the bulbs are called corms, but for the easiness, lets just call them bulbs) if the conditions in their pot are not ideal. Most of the time, even if they survive, they won't rebloom well in the pots, so this method of growing is somewhat redundant.

Crocus

More vigorous and faster multiplying varieties can become a bit of an invasive weed, especially it can be difficult to fish out all the miniature bulbs from the rock gardens or slurry soils. It is because of a rather interesting way how they, plainly speaking, dig themselves in: if the crocus bulb "thinks" its well being is threatened, it will try to send its new bulbs deeper into the soil, sometimes even as deep as half a meter or more.

This generally has a lot to do with a life cycle of a crocus bulb (corm) in general. In spring, the food stored in the bulb makes crocus to rapidly grow and produce leaves and flowers. Food made by the leaves is sent back, just not to the old bulb, but to the base of the stem above it. This region swells and forms a new bulb on top of the old one, and the old bulb shrinks and dies. Meanwhile, some spare buds on the old bulb will grow sideways and form new extra bulbs. However, a formation of a new bulb on top of the old one eventually would bring the successive bulbs nearer and nearer to the soil surface. To prevent that from happening, bulb develops contractile roots from the base of the new bulb, which, once grown, contract and pull the new bulb down.

Speaking of the crocus varieties, most commonly grown are cultivars of crocus vernus, crocus chrysanthus and crocus flavus, or their crosses, but there also are many other botanic species grown as ornamental plants. A rule of thumb is that dark purple, violet and yellow varieties often are more easy to grow than the clear blue ones, and multiply faster; with the white ones being somewhere in between.