An Iowa Garden

When I want to find something snippy to say about a particular flower bulb, there's no better source than the late Dicky Graff. She skewered many a little flower with her pen; her comment on the fall-blooming Crocus kotschyanus (shown above) is that it "is reticent to the point of being almost invisible. The flower is lilac, so pale and muted that a patch in full bloom has no more impact than a drift of wood smoke." Other writers have commented that as soon as it opens, a little rain shower inevitably comes along and shatters it. It has been called floppy, shy-blooming and even non-blooming in spite of the fact that it seeds all over the place. One gardener writes plaintively that he thinks his bulbs must be infected with a virus, because in spite of lots of foliage he never sees a flower.
My bulbs of Crocus kotschyanus came into this garden riding with a hosta that I dug up from my first garden eighty miles to the north of here; unfortunately that hosta was planted here in a very shady spot, guaranteeing poor blooming for this little sun-loving crocus. When it first started showing its foliage in my hosta bed, I knew it was a crocus, and watched for it to bloom in the spring: nothing. It kept multiplying and spreading, but still no blooms. Finally, one dark fall day, I spied these wispy little blooms, as grey and windswept as the day itself, sheltering underneath a hosta. Now each fall I get perhaps a dozen straggly blooms from about a hundred bulbs. The flowers come, then rapidly go, almost unnoticed and unlamented, in a few days. I dimly recall that when I first bought this bulb quite a few years ago for my first garden, it was called Crocus zonatus... like so many other plants, its name has mutated into an unpronounceable jumble of consonants. I intend to take a trowel out and dig up a few to place in a sunny spot to see if I get a better effect from this little wanderer from the rocky wilds of Turkey.