Category Archives: Bulbs

Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’

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Every now and then, I find a plant I adore and decide it needs a little homegrown public relations campaign. This long, cool spring with its attendant air of strange melancholy courtesy of Covid-19 was the backdrop for the month-long flowering of a little daffodil I originally saw at the Toronto Botanical Garden in 2012. This is Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’, paired with the lovely yellow-throated pink Triumph tulip ‘Tom Pouce’.

I made a note of how much I liked the daffodil and finally ordered 2 packages of 25 last summer from my friend Caroline deVries’s company FlowerBulbsRUs (she also has a wholesale business for designers and retail outlets). Come November, I wore my fancy, paint-splattered, rubber clogs and proceeded to dig my bulbs into my front yard meadow/pollinator garden.

This is what happens when your box of bulbs takes a photo of you in your 1980s car coat with the broken zipper that has stained more fences with you – and planted more tulips and daffodils – than you care to recall.

Fast forward to April 29th this spring and the bulbs in my little pollinator island.  This was a full month after the first species crocuses emerged on March 20th, followed by a blue sea of Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) and glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii) in April. I wrote in praise of all the “little bulbs” in an earlier blog this spring. The following day, I made my first portrait of Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’.

The daffodil world has its own rules, traditions and famous breeder names, many of them in England and Ireland. But there are notable North American personalities who have produced the so-called American Hybrids. One of those was Oregon’s Grant Mitsch (1907-1989), who bred ‘Pipit’, ‘Accent’ and ‘Dicksissel’. But it was Brent C. Heath, below at his farm and business Brent & Becky’s Bulbs in Gloucester, VA, who crossed the European jonquil or rush daffodil (Narcissus jonquilla)  with an old Irish long-cupped daffodil ‘Ballygarvey’ (pre-1947) to come up with the sweet ‘Golden Echo’ daffodil I’ve fallen in love with this spring. It’s the one filling the rows in the thousands below. Though he had grown it for more than a decade, it was registered in 2014 and won the Wister Award the following year.  Brent is the third generation of mail-order bulb farmers at the farm his grandfather started in 1900; now his son has become the fourth generation. Becky is president of Heath Enterprises, Ltd. I’ve known them both since I joined Gardencomm (Formerly the Garden Writers Association) more than two decades ago.

On May 2nd  of this cool, long spring, the little Greek windflowers (Anemone blanda ‘Blue Shades’) were fully-open pools of lavender and the Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’ had come into flower. Both complimented ‘Golden Echo’ beautifully.

When I decided to remove the old dwarf conifers that had grown too big for this island and replace them with a suite of perennials that would attract pollinators (here’s my video of a full year in the garden, made before planting ‘Shogun’ and ‘Golden Echo’)…..

…..adding lots of spring bulbs was just a seasonal bonus. (However, I did see honey bees gathering pollen from the crocuses early on and I’ve written about native cellophane bees on my Scilla siberica.)  But mostly it’s just to add preliminary colour to a garden I consider my gift to the neighbourhood.

In fact, that day I introduced myself to two women taking their daily walks at an appropriate, self-isolating distance from each other. As one snapped a few photos, they told me they loved seeing my garden change over the weeks since late March.

Here we see that fabulous apricot-gold ‘Shogun’ tulip with ‘Golden Echo’ and the purple-blue highlights of windflower and grape hyacinth.

Meanwhile in the main garden on the other side of the path, the big Fosteriana Tulipa ‘Orange Emperor’ was adding to the orange theme, just as the pink hyacinths were fading.

I made a lot of little nosegay bouquets this spring, including these ones on May 6th. ‘Golden Echo’ is in the one on the right, along with the pure white Narcissus ‘Stainless’ and the peach-trumpeted ‘Pink Accent’.  In the arrangement on the left are snakeshead fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagaris), Rhododendron ‘P.J.M.”, Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) and the wonderful white Triandrus daffodil Narcissus ‘Thalia’.


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Meanwhile, in the main garden on May 6th, ‘Thalia’ was the star, along with the first flowers of the big Darwin Hybrid tulip ‘Pink Impression’.  And, of course, ‘Golden Echo’.

On May 7th, I zeroed in on this pretty pairing: ‘Golden Echo’ with the fascinating flowers of the broad-leaved grape hyacinth (Muscari latifolium) from the mountains of Turkey. The dark-blue flowers on the bottom are fertile; whereas the azure-blue flowers on the top are sterile.

May 13th saw me including ‘Golden Echo’ in a tiny bouquet along with the clove-scented Tazetta Narcissus ‘Geranium’, the lovely, orange-flowered lily tulip ‘Ballerina’ and the first blue forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica). In the background are a few sprigs of forsythia. ‘Geranium’ is a personal favourite daffodil, one I included in a blog titled White Delight: Four Perfumed Daffodils to Tempt You.

By May 17th, you can see the green leaves of lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis) – or, as I call it ‘guerilla-of-the-valley’ – at the bottom right of this photo. Indeed, it is hugely invasive in my garden, but I tolerate it creeping around everything since it doesn’t seem to affect the emergence of the summer perennials. And, of course, I did make good use of it the years I used it to decorate the hats I wore to our botanical garden’s spring party.

It’s funny;  I thought I wanted white daffodils exclusively in my garden, like ‘Accent’ in the foreground, but the soft yellow of ‘Golden Echo’ isn’t as obtrusive as the ballpark-yellow of some of the early daffodils like ‘King Alfred’ and ‘Carlton’. It fits into my multicoloured scheme very nicely, with forget-me-nots creating little clouds of pale-blue.

By May 22nd , my Fothergilla gardenii shrubs began to open their white, bottlebrush flowers.

Though the ‘Shogun’ tulips in the pollinator island were long gone by then and the flowerheads removed (I always leave the foliage to ripen and turn yellow in order to feed next year’s bulb), little ‘Golden Echo’ was still flowering bravely amidst the emerging leaves of echinacea, rudbeckia, salvia and sedum.

On May 23rd, I photographed it with the first flowers of Camassia leichtleinii ‘Caerulea’, a bulb that is as short-lived in flower as ‘Golden Echo’ is long-lived.

In fact, if the cool Covid spring of 2020 had not given way to sweltering temperatures this week, I believe sweet ‘Golden Echo’ might have flowered for another week or so, since the bulbs put up new flower stems that bloom sequentially, rather than all at once. Nevertheless, I was delighted on May 23rd to make my final bouquet featuring Brent Heath’s lovely little hybrid daffodil, along with lily-of-the-valley, common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum), camassia and sweet-scented Burkwood’s viburnum (V. x burkwoodii).  By my count, that was almost four full weeks in bloom.

That night, it graced our outdoor table and the sixth take-out Covid meal we ordered from local restaurants to support them – and to give me a break from cooking. Hopefully, the restaurants will be back in business completely soon. I know that ‘Golden Echo’ will be back next spring, and the springs after that.

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To order Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’ in Canada, visit FlowerBulbsRUs. If you order before August 31, there’s a discount built into the price and free shipping for orders above $75.

To order it in the United States, visit Brent & Becky’s Bulbs.

In Praise of the Little Bulbs

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After five long months of wintry weather in Toronto, there is nothing more uplifting than the first flowers of the small spring bulbs. Over many years, small bulbs and corms in my front garden have multiplied, their clumps becoming gradually bigger, or seeds have scattered about until there are pools of colour. My camera finger is always itchy after being out of service since the last of the fall colour dies down, so I head outdoors as often as I can. In this spring of self-isolation, that might be several times a day and I’m often greeted by neighbours stopping to see what’s in bloom. The cold March and April temperatures have made the flowering parade move as slowly as sap up a maple trunk, but every year starts the same – with the snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis). Because they can easily be moved in flower, I have been dividing this old snowdrop clump and digging sections into my front garden.

I’ve also made a habit through the years of cutting these tiny flowers and giving them the high-fashion studio treatment, like the snowdrops below in an antique shot glass.

Next to emerge is usually a tie between species crocuses and little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’. I adore her. She was bred in 1955 in England by E. Bertram Anderson  Her mother is pale yellow Iris winogradowii hailing from the Caucasus mountains. That gives her extreme cold hardiness and her tendency to shrug off snow.

Her father is pale purplish blue I. histrioides from Turkey, lending her the pretty pale blue hue. Her existence is the result of only 2 seeds produced in open pollination breeding work by Anderson, a founding member of the RHS Joint Rock Garden Plant Committee and president of the Alpine Garden Society from 1948-53. She flowered in 1960 and was named for the wife of Anderson’s friend Eliot Hodgkin

This year, my crocuses were wonderful, both the species “tommies” (Crocus tommasinanus) and the bigger, slightly later-flowering Dutch hybrids.

On the one warm day we experienced so far this April, I found honey bees foraging for pollen on the crocuses. I’ve always wondered who in my neighbourhood has beehives, since the property size requirements for beekeeping are fairly stringent in Toronto. Having done a little research, I think they likely originated in the hives on the roof of Sporting Life department store about a half-mile from my garden.

I often combine these early bloomers in a tiny bouquet. Even though they last only a few days, the joy they bring is in inverse proportion to their size.

Crocuses, of course, have their own chalice-like charm – even if they decline to stay open long once removed from sunshine.

My front garden in early spring is anything but neat, given that I mulch it with leaves in autumn and leave many cut perennial stems to biodegrade where they fall. I do lighten the leaf mulch in late winter a little, raking some off so the small bulbs don’t get lost in the duff. This is a side-by-side view of my front garden this spring on March 23rd and April 13th. Once the crocuses fade, the Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) starts to turn my entire garden azure-blue. Most springs, the native cellophane bee and bumble bees make great use of the scilla carpet, but this year’s temperatures have kept most bees in their nests.

My garden’s “blue period” also includes the amazing, rich-pink Corydalis solida ‘George Baker’.

I always love the combination below, ‘George Baker’ with glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa).  A few weeks ago, I divided some of my corydalis clumps while in flower and spotted them throughout the garden. That deep cherry-pink is too good not to spread around!

And, of course, I’ve given George his own studio cameos in the past as well……

The glory-of-the-snow has been ready for its closeup….

…. as has the cultivar ‘Violet Beauty’.

Striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides) are ultra-hardy little bulbs featuring pale-blue flowers with a darker blue stripe.

Here’s a closer look of that sweet striped face.

Between the Siberian squill, the glory-of-the-snow and the striped squill, the colour theme of these chilly weeks of early spring is most definitely blue. And with most everyone in Toronto now into their second month of self-isolation, the neighbours have been telling me how much they’re enjoying watching my front garden change every week.

This was a little bouquet I made on April 6th, happy that there were still a few orange crocuses to give it some zing.
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White Siberian squill (Scilla siberica ‘Alba’) come out a little later than the blue ones.

Photographing them in a tiny bouquet lets me appreciate details of their flowers that often go unnoticed when they flower en masse.

Among my favourite of the small spring flowers are Greek windflowers or wood anemones (Anemone blanda). These are tubers, rather than bulbs, and they need to be soaked for 24 hours prior to being planted in autumn.  Their daisy-like flowers always cheer me up – though they only open wide when the sun is shining.  This cultivar is ‘Blue Shades’.

Putting just one windflower in the tiniest vase reveals the beautiful contrast of the bright yellow stamens with the silky petals and fern-like leaves.

‘Pink Charmer’ is lovely, but tends to be mauve….

….. and finally there’s ‘White Splendor’.

My broad-leaved grape hyacinths (Muscari latifolium) have just emerged and are still tight. The light flowers at the top are sterile, while the deep-purple ones at the base are fertile.

Here they are, below, in a little salt shaker vase.  Common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum) emerge just a little bit later.

Along my sideyard path under a big black walnut tree is a colony of Corydalis solida that comes into bloom a little later than the pink ‘George Baker’ in my front garden. This species is very vigorous and will make its way around the garden and even pop up in the lawn. In fact some gardeners consider it a weed – but I adore it. And after it finishes flowering, its leaves turn yellow quickly in the thicket of Solomon’s seal just emerging, then it disappears until next year. You might also see it hybridizing with some of the colourful cultivars, if you can find them to order.

Like all these little spring treasures, it is such fun to snip a handful to bring indoors so they can be appreciated for their beauty up close.

Soon the forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) will be in flower. I have loads of these biennials throughout the garden and their season is very long. By the time my crabapple tree is in bloom along with later tulips and daffodils, they will be pale blue clouds underneath.

But for now, I enjoy adding the very first forget-me-not blossoms to the little bulb bouquets that now include common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum)……

….. and the native Confederate violets (Viola sororia var. priceana).

All this early beauty of the little bulbs, this re-affirmation that spring brings colourful renewal – especially this year, when we need it so desperately – is one of the most beloved aspects of my own garden. I simply would not be without my snowdrops, crocuses, corydalis, puschkinia, scilla or grape hyacinths. And then, as if by magic, all these wondrous little chorines of the first act will quietly wither and disappear under the later weeks of tulips, daffodils, camassias and the emerging foliage of summer perennials, lying dormant below the soil surface so they can perform the same miracle early next spring.  Needless to say, the foliage of all spring bulbs must be allowed to turn yellow and ripen in order for continued photosynthesis to nurture the bulbs as long as possible.

Meanwhile, my garden moves on through myriad subsequent scenes, not in the least hindered by all these tiny bulbs that helped me bid farewell to winter. Here is my front garden over the space of twelve months. This year I’m filled with anticipation – and nothing but time to enjoy it.

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I buy almost all of my spring bulbs from my friend Caroline deVries’ online retail store flowerbulbsrus. They are available at reduced prices until August 31st and are excellent quality.  A good selection of the small bulbs is also available at www.botanus.com in British Columbia; they ship throughout Canada. (I purchased my own cultivars of Corydalis solida in Canada from gardenimport, which sadly is no longer in business).  In the U.S., small spring bulbs can be purchased from my friends Brent and Becky Heath at https://www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com/. They have discounts for ordering before July 1st.

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If you love spring bulbs, you might want to read my blog on my favourite daffodils and one of tulip design in the spring garden courtesy of the Toronto Botanical Garden, or my visit to the spectacular Abbotsford Tulip Festival.

In Greece’s Saffron Crocus Fields

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As part of a botanical tour of Greece this autumn, led by Eleftherios Dariotis for the North American Rock Garden Society, I had the most magical visit to the saffron fields of the west Macedonia province in the small town of Krokos. If you photograph flower bulbs, as I do, the saffron crocus is a kind of holy grail – historic, culturally rich, with a mellow yellow whiff of mystery and romance. So it was a very special morning, followed by a saffron-themed lunch in Kozani three miles away. Our tour started in the town of Krokos (yes, that’s Greek for “crocus”) at the Kozani Saffron Producers Cooperative, called the Cooperative de Safran, below. Founded in 1971, it has 2,000 members from 41 villages in the area. According to Greek law, the Cooperative holds the exclusive rights to the collection, distribution and packaging of Greek saffron under the name ‘Krokos Kozanis’.

Outside the building, I saw my very first saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) in a weedy little bed in front of the building. Note the three very long scarlet stigmas (or as the Greek say, stigmata).  The saffron crocus is not actually found in nature, but is an “autotriploid” version of its endemic progenitor Crocus cartwrightianus, which I’ll explain more about below.

Along the raised driveway behind the building, the murals celebrated this plant of antiquity…..

….. and the people who strain their backs to pick the flowers and harvest the stigmas from late October into early November (we visited on Halloween day) …..

…. and those who work with the stigmas once they’re dried and ready to become the saffron of our kitchen herbal.

In the building, we passed a room with a group of women at work weighing and packaging the tiny threads of saffron.

Depending on whose data you read, it takes between 85,000 and 150,000 flowers with their three stigmas to make 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of saffron. This has led to saffron being called “red gold”. In fact it was traditionally measured with the same types of scales used to measure gold.. I bought a few 2 gram packages from the Cooperative for €4.50 each, which I think was a very good price for top quality saffron. And given that there appears to be a lot of counterfeit saffron in powder form out there (usually with a little actual saffron supplemented with dyed filler), it’s important to buy your saffron from approved sources.

We listened to a presentation in Greek by the director of the cooperative, translated by Eleftherios.

Then we toured the product packaging area downstairs. I won’t even attempt to calculate what a tin like this filled with saffron threads would cost. But it would make a lot of risotto!  There was a drying room, machines that did goodness-knows-what and big cartons addressed to places in the U.S. all ready to be shipped.

Finally it was time to drive out to the fields, the “Krokohória”. The harvesting season was in full swing, with purple flowers dotting bare soil in field after field along the roads.

The saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, below, is not known in nature. Recent genotyping-by-sequencing has determined that it is likely (99.3%) an ancient hybrid of…..

….. two different genotypes (autotriploid) of a wild Crocus cartwrightianus population south of Athens. During our tour I photographed this species, below, en route from Athens to Cape Sounion at the most southerly tip of Greece.

Like all crocuses, saffron crocus grows from a “corm”, not a bulb. But unlike all other crocuses which can be pollinated and make seed, its triploid nature means that it is sterile, therefore all new plants must come from offsets of mature corms.

Each patch had a few pickers bent over plucking flowers to place in their buckets. If this isn’t the most backbreaking work in all agriculture, I don’t know what is.

But it is an ancient practice, one that we know reaches back in Greece 3,500 years. We can be that specific because of the great preservative power of volcanic ash. If you visit the museum on the island of Santorini (Thera), as I did eight years ago, you can see fragments of wall frescoes, below, found buried under layers of the ash that descended on the Minoan Bronze Age settlement of Akrotiri during a massive, multi-stage volcanic eruption in roughly 1600 BC.

Though no human remains were discovered, leading researchers to conclude that the inhabitants fled a few months earlier during preliminary volcanic activity, the deep layer of tephra, which includes the thick, silvery pumice layer you can see in the upper part of my photo, below (I was on the deck of a ship which was floating on sea water at the surface of the caldera that formed during the resultant collapse of the volcano)…..

…… created a kind of Bronze Age museum, similar to Pompeii. And because of that, we know that the young Minoan woman below was doing exactly what…..

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We were introduced to a husband-and-wife team of crocus pickers who agreed to be our interpretive guides. Their sweet dog kept them company.  Look at the woman’s hands; saffron is also an ancient dye.

The man dug up a clump of crocuses to show us how the corms form offsets, gradually forming large clumps. In time, these are dug up, the older corms discarded and the younger corms replanted.

We saw their basket of newly-picked flowers. The stigmas must be harvested quickly to avoid deterioration in quality.

Then the woman pressed into our hands little piles of silky purple flowers.

We inhaled the light, enigmatic fragrance. Saffron absolute is an ingredient in many perfumes, including those by Bella Bellissima (Royal Saffron), Donna Karan (Black Cashmere), Giorgia Armani (Idole d’Armani), Givenchy (Ange ou Demon) and Lady Gaga (Fame), among others. Saffron was also said to be an aphrodisiac. According to an article in National Geographic about Iran’s saffron industry, “Cleopatra was said to bathe in saffron-infused mare’s milk before seeing a suitor”. (Please don’t try this at home. I’ve heard it doesn’t work with low-fat cow’s milk and I have no idea what would clean saffron from enamel.)

The crocus pickers’ dog was getting a little bored….

….. but our Greek guide Eleftherios was happy. We had hit the harvest timing perfectly!

Because I’ve been known to photograph a few honey bees in my time, I then looked around to see what I could find in the crocuses.  There was one riding a stigma with great style (sorry, bad botanical pun)…..

…… and two rolling in the golden pollen. Like all crocuses, C. sativus produces lots of protein-rich pollen for bees, even though the flowers are sterile.

We walked down the road to see other pickers working their fields.

Discarded crocus tepals lay in piles at the edges of the fields, the end product of the morning’s harvest of saffron threads. What a wonderful visit we had.

Then it was on to the large town of Kozani where we sat down for a multi-course lunch, all saffron-themed. There was a saffron-infused chicken soup….

…… and a sweet (secret recipe) saffron sauce for grilled Greek cheeses….

….. and saffron chicken…..

….. followed by risotto, then saffron ice cream. All with wine. The Greeks do know how to do “lunch”.

It was the perfect way to finish our saffron adventure, to embroider our growing canvas of autumn-flowering Greek bulbs with these intricate, beautiful scarlet threads.

Tiptoeing Through the Tulips at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival

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It’s a cool spring here in Toronto, and things are late to flower; when they do, they hold on for a long time. My tulips have just started opening, but ten days ago I was lucky enough to tiptoe through gazillions of gorgeous tulips at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival in the Fraser Valley, about 73 kilometres (43 miles) from Vancouver, B.C.  I was there visiting my west coast family and my sister Bonnie, right, was kind enough to take me to the festival. So… natch… we asked a perfect stranger to take our picture.

Then we started touring.  This is the patch where visitors are allowed to pick their own tulip stems to buy to take home. Isn’t it fun?

People were very happy to be capturing a little of this floral joy.

And the cameras! From pros with tripods, to SLRs around necks, to every kind of cellphone camera, the shutterbugs were there.

Tulips have a long period of flowering, from the Single Early types and botanical tulips to the Single Late varieties. In a cool spring, tulips might flower for six weeks, but when temperatures warm up, so does the speed with which the tulips flower and fade. Fortunately for me our visit was perfectly timed at pleasant (not warm) temperatures for maximum bloom! And best of all, it was the kind of high overcast sky that I love for photography (and thanks to my sis for the photo below).

As for photography tips (and almost all of mine were made with my Samsung S8 cellphone), here are two images I made from my vantage point above. I think most people would agree that this one…..

….. is not as visually powerful as the one below. Why is that? While the one above captures the little mountains in the background and has a nice sense of vanishing point perspective, it’s a bit too easy on the eyes. The one below, by placing the angle of the tulip rows on the oblique and cutting out the far landscape but leaving the horizon showing, focuses attention on the spectacular geometry of the fields and the brilliant colour combinations of the tulips. That double magenta, by the way, is ‘Margarita’.

I caught Bonnie photographing the rose-flushed, light-pink Triumph tulip ‘Rosalie’…..

…. which is a lovely soft shade to use with mauves and lilacs.

One of my favourite tulips is the dramatic Single Late ‘Queen of Night’. I grow this one myself…..

….. and I liked the way it had cheekily intruded into this hot pink and orange mix.  Hello!!

Speaking of intruders, I think most of us secretly love it when a solid block of single-colour tulips is visited by an interloper – the tulip version of photo-bombing. This is the Single Late yellow ‘La Courtine’ in a bed of the magenta-pink Triumph ‘Milka’.

Tulip interiors like those of ‘Milka’ are fun to photograph. Defined as “perennial herbaceous bulbiferous geophytes” (i.e. they come back every year, they’re herbs not shrubs, they grow from bulbs, and they have perennating, underground storage organs), tulips are members of the Lily Family, Liliaceae.

Tulips are native to parts of southern Europe and Central Asia (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and the other “stan”countries) and the name is believed to derive from the Persian word for turban, tuliband. Indeed, tulips were an essential part of the court of the Ottoman Empire, as this story from Amsterdam’s Tulip Museum recalls.

The Dutch, of course, have cornered the market in tulip-breeding. When we were in the Netherlands in 1998, we loved driving through the tulip fields near Lisse.

Those blocks of vibrant colour are so tantalizing. In 1885, Impressionist painter Claude Monet travelled in the Netherlands and painted The Tulip Fields and Rijnsberg Windmill.

As well, you can see tulips planted in beautiful combinations at spectacular Keukenhhof Gardens, which is the exhibition garden for numerous Dutch bulb-growers.

Here in Canada, I’ve been to the Ottawa Tulip Festival, which I wrote about in a previous blog.

But back to the Abbotsford Tulip Festival, here are some beautifully grown modern tulip bulbs. This is ‘Camargue’, a pink-streaked sport of the tulip ‘Menton’. It starts out pale yellow and ages to ivory-white.

‘Caravelle’ is a stunning tulip, a Single Late variety with beetroot-purple flowers. It was used in several mixed beds here at the festival as well.


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‘Happy Generation’, below, may look familiar to some. It was branded as a Limited Edition ‘Canada 150’ tulip during our country’s sesquicentennial in 2017, since it looks like the flame that burns at our parliament buildings in Ottawa.

I grow ‘Dordogne’ in my own garden – I love the gold and salmon tones in this tulip.

‘Flaming Parrot’ is a fine-feathered bird (as are all the Parrot tulips). It starts out with yellow in the colour mix and then fades to creamy-white and red.

It’s also fun to look into this one.

And here it is in a beautiful mixture at the Abbotsford Tulip Festival.

‘Spring Green’, below, is a Viridiflora Tulip.  Underneath it is a lovely tulip I grow in my garden…..

….. the deep-red 1942 Parrot Tulip ‘Rococo’.

Some combinations are unusual but work well, like the dark-mauve Fringed Tulip ‘Louvre’ with the salmon-flushed golden-yellow Darwin Hybrid Tulip ‘World Peace’.

‘Denmark’ is a strong, bicolour Triumph.

Pink and white make a pretty pairing – don’t know the names of these two.

Okay, I think we’ve taken the weird double tulip thing far enough. I don’t care if they look like  sundaes and someone named them ‘Ice Cream’ – please make this trend stop!

At the far end of the tulip fields, there was a windmill. Of course! And I had to pose.

There was also a basket, which we decided must be suggestive of a hot air balloon….? Or maybe bulb growers in the Netherlands carry bulbs in baskets? Anyway, we posed it that, too!

What fun people were having with their selfie sticks and walking up and down the paths with kids and grandparents.

Everyone was posing for the perfect tulips-and-me shot!

Wisely, the festival folks made it easy to get online publicity….. #colourinthecountry. And they have an online store too where you can order favourites.

But it was now time to go. I did love the brilliant displays with all their colourful geometry and such beautifully grown tulips, but……

…. as a gardener, I prefer to grow them not in soldier-like rows but mixed in with daffodils, small bulbs like Anemone blanda, crocuses, grape hyacinths (Muscari sp.), all set in a matrix of emerging perennials that will carry the garden throughout summer into autumn. And colour-wise, I do love a tulip party, thanks to my own bulb supplier pal Caroline de Vries.

In my garden, the tulip season begins with Darwin Hybrids and finishes with the Single Late tulips in a symphony of light-purple Camassia leichtlinii and Fothergilla gardenii. And that should all be happening any day now, if spring in Toronto would just warm up!

 

Early Spring Blossoms at the Toronto Botanical Garden

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I popped by the Toronto Botanical Garden this morning for a quick look at what’s in bloom. It’s been such a long, cold winter and reluctant spring, an hour in the garden was just the therapy I needed. So what did I see?  Well, in all the years I’ve been photographing at the TBG, I’ve never spied the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) in the hedge cages in flower. With the ‘marcescent’ foliage (persisting through winter) of the beeches (Fagus sylvatica), it made a unique and lovely entrance to the George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture, the main building.

There were loads of hellebores doing their thing. Helleborus ‘Red Lady’ is a long-time performer and has multiplied beautifully beside the stone wall of the building. I loved the sober backdrop it made for flamboyant Narcissus ‘Tiritomba’.

I found a nice assortment of hellebores under the ‘Merrill’ magnolia just opening. This is Helleborus x ericsmithii HGC Merlin (‘Coseh 810’). Isn’t it lovely?

Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Cinnamon Snow (‘Coseh 700’) was spicing things up.

And Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Ice Breaker Prelude (‘Coseh 830’) was meltingly gorgeous.

In a protected corner of the Westview Terrace, Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’ was in full flower.

I could photograph magnolias all day.

Containers of spring bulbs brought a welcome note of colour.

Nearby was a little reticulated iris still in flower. Though it was labelled differently, I think its the McMurtrie cultivar Iris reticulata ‘Velvet Smile’.
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On the bank where donkey tail spurge (Euphorbia myrsinites) scrambles, the variegated Tulipa praestans ‘Unicum’ was in flower.

Incidentally, the tulip season at the Toronto Botanical Garden is very long and beautiful. I wrote a long blog last year about TBG’s tulip stunning combinations.

Hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) just need a little warmth to emit their perfume……

….. and even graced the path to the TBG’s big compost piles, along with daffodils.

Speaking of daffodils, I thought this one in the Entrance Courtyard was pretty spectacular. Meet Narcissus ‘British Gamble’.

The small bulbs were mostly finished, but glory-of-the-snow Scillia luciliae ‘Pink Giant’ (formerly Chionodoxa) was fading but still beautiful.

As I walked along the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border toward my car, I saw a favourite tulip, T. kaufmanniana ‘Ice Stick’ looking slender and lovely beside emerging perennials that will soon fill the garden with blossoms that will charm visitors until autumn. And I thought how wonderful each and every spring seems, to the winter-weary gardener.

PS – I will very soon get back to New Zealand… and the Argentina part of our wine tour. Promise! (Unless spring keeps beguiling me……..)