An Iowa Garden

A deep low pressure area rose from the western plains, and today made a beeline for the Great Lakes, dragging a long plume of moisture up from the Gulf of Mexico, which rapidly formed a powerful line of storms, like cracking a whip across the midwest. The sirens in nearby Iowa City wailed as low, dark clouds streamed and billowed across the sky. Our little valley escaped, sliding through a little opening in the squall line, with large hail just over the ridge to the north, and sixty mile an hour winds with a tornado in the flats thirteen miles to the south. Half an hour after the sirens first sounded, the ground haze cleared, and long trains of fluffy white clouds were being drawn across a blueing sky; like gay tails trailing a kite, as the dark storm rapidly rumbled to the northeast.
It is a day to consider and appreciate events in the sky, but also small things close to the ground... it is a day to appreciate squills. In front of the fireplace in winter, I don't dream about squills; I'm not even sure I'd miss them if some mischevious garden sprite snuck them out of our garden, but each year, when they bloom, I am grateful for their cheery abandon and sharp colors. They ask nothing more than a tiny bit of neglected soil, and give their all, blooming their little hearts out. Sara Teasdale wrote:
How many million Aprils came before I knew
how white a cherry bough could be, a bed of squills how blue.
Scilla siberica (the Siberian blue squill), above, is a small squill, which has only one to perhaps five flowers at most on each stem, but what flowers they are! An intense Prussian blue, they glow in the sunshine, making a striking background for yellow daffodils. Pusckinia scilloides var. Libanotica (Push-kin-ee-uh), the striped squill, shown in the last picture below, is of course not a squill at all but is squill-like (scilloides). Dicky Graff, in her classic book Flowers in the Winter Garden, disparages Puschkinia, stating "I mention it here only to point up the superiority of Scilla tubergeniana. Bluntly and briefly, the puchkinia is not a good garden subject. Its flowers are bunched at the end of an ungainly scape far above the scant leaves. To make things worse, the stem goes limp in hot sun- a hazard it inevitably suffers in mid-April, so that the symmetry of a patch is lost in a snaggle of drooping, snaky lines." Well, all I've got to say, is that nobody is perfect! Dicky does allow that, paltry though the flowers are, they are a magnet for bees, an observation that I can vouch for (and appreciate greatly... few things are as cheery on a fine spring day, than seeing honeybees bustle over these little flowers, bending the stalks almost to the ground by their numbers). Now, I am as big a fan of Scilla tubergeniana, the white squill, as any gardening lad around, and freely admit that, as shown in the next picture below, that it makes a much finer clump than its demure little country cousin, Puschkinia scilloides, but I have a warm spot for the striped squill; it was the first little bulb I ever grew, and the elfin blue-striped flowers that are dotting the garden now are all children of that first little bag of tiny bulbs that I bought twenty-five years ago.