‘Weldenii Fairy’ crocus

Crocus are the classic and much-loved symbol of spring, blooming early and offering such beautiful colors to our winter-weary eyes! For Fall 2023 we’re excited to be adding some delightful varieties to our offerings and wanted to bring them to your attention now so you could consider them as you survey your spring garden.

‘Weldenii Fairy’ crocus – This magical variety of C. biflorus, or Scotch crocus, has outer petals of light violet and silvery-white centers with a lilac blush. These diminutive sprites bloom early and naturalize well where happy.

‘Prins Claus’ crocus

‘Prins Claus’ crocus – Like other snow crocus, this eye-catching prince of the C. chrysanthus lineage is an early bloomer, distinguished by its regal deep, dark purple petals that alternate with white ones to enliven your spring garden.

‘Hubert Edelsten’ crocus

‘Hubert Edelsten’ crocus – This rare form of C. sieberi was developed nearly a century ago by Mr. Edelsten, a neighbor of British garden-writer E.A. Bowles who described the man as “almost as mad about crocuses as I am” and his variety as “very beautiful.” The three outer petals are bright purple with a dramatic white band matching the white of the inner petals. Bright orange stamens add to the glory!

‘Golden Scepter’ dahlia

‘Juanita’ dahlia

‘Kelvin Floodlight’ dahlia

Dahlias can be glorious landscape plants, providing bursts of colors in the late summer and early fall when much of the garden is slowing down, while some varieties are especially popular for bouquets to enjoy indoors. As we get ready for spring here we’ve been talking about which dahlias we can’t wait to see bloom again or want to try for the first time and thought we’d share them with you in case you’re new to dahlias - or looking for something different- and would like our suggestions. There’s such variation in color, form, and size that there’s bound to be something to suit your particular tastes.

Vanessa, OHG’s owner and head researcher of old varieties, says “I'm always a big fan of varieties where no two flowers are the same. You can cut 10 flowers from ‘Tartan’ and the burgundy and white combination can vary considerably through the bunch. This can also be true for ‘Nita’, although usually less so. There are sometimes so many petals on a ‘Nita’ flower it can look like a ball of petals! I recommend ‘Golden Scepter’ because it groups well with all varieties and is one of our most floriferous varieties.”

Justin, who is our technical wizard and website-designer, all while studying to graduate nursing school this spring (!), mentioned three different favorites: ‘Little Beeswings’, ‘Juanita’, and ‘Kelvin Floodlight’. He reports that “‘Little Beeswings’ paired wonderfully next to my up-and-coming rose patch with its similar colors and size of blooms. ‘Juanita’ was the first dahlia I ever grew. The shades of maroon and crimson are very elegant and look great in my kitchen, so it's a keeper!” His third pick is ‘Kelvin Floodlight’ which “was just shockingly large and bright the first time I held one in my hand. I remember staring at it and studying the intricate arrangement of florets for far too long. Inspecting the stems you'll see the plant is built to handle them too” and concludes “My love and appreciation for flowers stems from their attractive look and the vital role they play in keeping us all alive.”

Meanwhile Rita, our office manager and one-who-keeps-everything-on-track, is a champion for ‘Amber Queen’, for once it “starts to bloom you'll have non-stop flowers until the frost. The blossom size is perfect for a small vase on a nightstand. The color blends with almost every flower. It’s lovely in summer bouquets but really grows into a star during the fall. I love to arrange it in small pumpkins and share as a gift with friends.” ‘Requiem’, Rita says, is “a statement flower for sure – bold, bright and beautiful. She loves that "the color is so highly saturated, and it’s gorgeous with ‘Plum Tart’ gladiolus. The stems are long and strong, making it great for cutting – ‘Requiem’ is part of my kitchen table bouquet all summer long.” Her last choice is the bold ‘Thomas Edison’, enthusing “I've worked here for 18 years and ‘Thomas Edison’ is one that I recommend highly! It is a reliable and strong plant with sturdy stems and flowers that hold up for a long time in the vase. The color is striking and it is just as nice in the garden as it is in bouquets. It blooms so abundantly throughout the season that you will have enough to share!”

Amelia, who comes in for shipping season to check orders and keep them flowing to the barn for packing, wanted to draw your attention to ‘Andries’ Orange’, which “is a glorious star-burst of radiant orange that catches my eye from across the yard! It’s got great stems for cutting and I love how the spiny petals contrast with the smooth ones of other varieties.” She says she’s “thrilled to see ‘Nepos’ available this year – I think it’s such a beautiful combination of white, pink and lavender! I love it in a vase or out in the garden and grow it every chance I get.” Amelia has kept bees for years and “wouldn’t be without ‘Bonne Esperance’ because it starts blooming early, keeps going reliably through frost and has simple open flowers that make it a bee favorite.”

Still can’t decide? You can’t go wrong with either of our ‘Endless Bouquets’ and ‘Dreamy Dahlias’ samplers - they combine some of our most popular varieties and let you save some money at the same time.

‘Requiem’ dahlia

‘Nepos’ dahlia

‘Tartan’ dahlia

Between an ice storm two weeks ago and last Friday’s winter storm, we in Michigan have been through a number of days without power, but we’re digging out and continuing to prepare for shipping spring orders in early April. (We’ve learned from long experience that shipping before the end of March is just too risky for our cold-tender bulbs. Thanks for your patience!) Snowdrops and Eranthis are bravely blooming whenever the snow melts from around them, and other bulbs are starting to peep out of the earth. We hope that whether your spring has already arrived or, like us, it’s still some weeks off, that you’re warm and well!

Forgot to order? We still have great varieties for spring planting available!

Although it may be too late for you lucky souls who garden where spring is already well advanced, here are some tips for those of you in colder zones:

1. Crocus, snowdrops, and other bulbs start to emerge earlier than many gardeners realize, especially in warm spots where the snow melts first. Matted leaves and winter mulch can distort their growth, so get out there EARLY and gently loosen or remove it.

2. Rabbits and other animals love to eat crocus, so you may want to spray leaves and buds with a repellant the moment they emerge. Check to see if you have some on hand before you need it, because the animals won’t wait! Tulips and lilies are two other, later-emerging animal delicacies that you may also want to spray.

3. Very early spring is also one of the best times to scratch a little fertilizer into the soil above your bulbs. If you wait too long, particles tend to get lodged between the leaves at their bases where they can burn the tender new foliage. Early spring is also when bulbs need the fertilizer to fuel their rapid growth and bloom. Don’t overdo it, though, and remember it’s always good to be guided by a soil test.

4. Now is also a good time to wash any pots that you’re planning to use for starting dahlias or growing tuberoses, etc. Finish by sterilizing them for a few minutes in a mix of 10% bleach and water. Later when you’re scrambling to keep up with your burgeoning garden, you’ll be glad you did.

In-person daffodil shows are back this year, starting in early March in warmer states and continuing through early May in other areas. In a recent issue of The Daffodil Journal Mary Lou Gripshoever shared some tips and techniques for how to save up daffodil blossoms for exhibition – or for a birthday, wedding, or other celebration. (To find varieties that will bloom early, late, or in the middle of the season next year, see our chart.)

If the event is just a week or so away, put your cut flowers in a glass of water, cover it all with a plastic bag, and store it in your refrigerator till then. You can add more flowers as they open in your garden.

On the other hand, she says, if it will be several weeks, you can use a box to refrigerate your daffodils - but store them dry. Line your box with plastic, make a cushion with tissue paper, and lay your flowers on it with the heads near the edge of the box. Then (if you have more blossoms) make another cushion of tissue paper on top of their stems and lay a second layer of flowers on top of that. If your box is long enough, you can do the same starting at the other edge of the box. Wrap the whole box in plastic and store it in your refrigerator. Then when it’s time for the event, you can transport the box there, then re-cut the stems, place them in water, and arrange them to look their best.

Another great tip she suggests for show entries is to write the variety name in ball point pen on the stem of each daffodil as you cut them so that you’ll identify it correctly when filling out your entry form. Good luck, and we’d love to hear about your successes!

Dutch bulb-growers celebrated their eleventh annual Tulip Day recently by filling a town square in Amsterdam with 200,000 tulips in full bloom and inviting the public to pick a bouquet for free. Although it’s much too early for tulips to be blooming outdoors in the Netherlands (these tulips were grown in greenhouses), Tulip Day marks the beginning of the season for tulips as cut flowers and in pots, and by the end of April this year over a billion tulip bulbs will be sold worldwide.

It’s still quite cold in Amsterdam, but people dressed warmly and had a great time. Each person was given a bag that would hold up to 20 tulips of whichever types they liked best. The tulips were grown in greenhouses and trucked to the site in shallow crates filled with a planting mix so light that people pulled the tulips up roots and all and then trimmed them for the vase when they got home. For photos - and the countdown calendar for Tulip Day 2024! - take a look at their website. And to plan a tulip-cutting garden of your own, you’ll find this year’s offerings and a handy chart for comparing bloom times at our website.

Starting in January every year, we get emails from customers in warmer parts of the country who can’t wait to share their good news with us: “Minor Monarque is blooming!” “My freesias are coming up!” “When I came home from work my Lent lilies were open!”

Those happy emails make the last months of our Michigan winters a lot easier to trudge through, so please keep them coming. But please remember as you’re basking in spring’s glory that we won’t have nighttime lows consistently above freezing till early APRIL, so we don’t start shipping till then. We want your bulbs to reach you in perfect condition, not frozen to mush. Thanks for your patience, and happy spring!

If you’re sick and tired of winter, here’s a sure cure: stroll through our virtual garden of bright, beautiful flowers for spring planting – and then treat yourself to a few of them! Despite some early sold-outs, we have plenty of amazing antique iris, daylilies, dahlias, glads, tuberoses, crocosmia, rain lilies, and our easy samplers waiting to thrill you at oldhousegardens.com. And if you order by March 1, we’ll add an extra bulb! (If you already placed your spring order, never fear – your gift has been reserved for you.)

Shipping starts in early April – and don’t worry, spring IS coming!

If (like us) you carefully tucked your dahlias into storage last fall and then got busy with Thanksgiving and family holidays, now’s the time to take a look and see how they’re doing. We recommend that you keep them in a cool, dry, dark place, ideally between 40-45 F. Look for condensation, letting some moisture escape if you see it, or shriveling of tubers, in which case sprinkle or mist them with a little water. Make a note of any varieties looking iffy so you can check them again in a few weeks in case you want to reorder them before they sell out. (And, for those of you new to dahlias, you don’t need to store your dahlias – you can treat them as annuals or frost-tender perennials that you just replace in the spring.)

For us, winter’s also a great time to explore books and articles we set aside in our desire to be in the garden the rest of the year. We were thrilled to learn from one of Maria Popova’s elegant online essays, “The Marginalian”, that poet Emily Dickinson was an ardent botanist from an early age. Popova writes, “Long before she began writing poems, Dickinson undertook a rather different yet unexpectedly parallel art of contemplation and composition — the gathering, growing, classification, and pressing of flowers, which she saw as manifestations of the Muse not that dissimilar to poems…Dickinson started studying botany at the age of nine and assisting her mother at the garden at twelve, but it wasn’t until she began attending Mount Holyoke in her late teens”, where with the encouragement of the college’s founder, botanist Mary Lyon, “she began approaching her botanical zeal with scientific rigor.”

Popova describes Dickinson’s herbarium as “a masterpiece of uncommon punctiliousness and poetic beauty: 424 flowers from the Amherst region, which Dickinson celebrated as ‘beautiful children of spring,’ arranged with a remarkable sensitivity to scale and visual cadence across sixty-six pages in a large leather-bound album. Slim paper labels punctuate the specimens like enormous dashes inscribed with the names of the plants — sometimes colloquial, sometimes Linnaean — in Dickinson’s elegant handwriting. What emerges is an elegy for time, composed with passionate patience, emanating the same wakefulness to sensuality and mortality that marks Dickinson’s poetry.”

Dickinson’s original collection of pressed specimens is now preserved at Harvard’s Houghton Rare Book Library, though its fragility means that very few can examine it. But as Popova reports, Harvard has digitized the entire “miraculous masterpiece at the intersection of poetry and science” and made it available to all!

For further explorations of Dickinson’s work at the intersection of art and science, see ​Judith Farr’s book The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, Popova’s book Figuring, and her follow-up essay about the evolution of flowers and an amazing animation combining images from the herbarium with a musical composition based on Dickinson’s poem “Bloom”.

So unusual and beautiful that even canna-haters love it, ‘Ehemanii’ is one of the most exciting plants we’ve ever offered. But don’t take our word for it. Our friend Greg Grant (Heirloom Gardening in the South) has spent a lifetime growing and promoting exceptional plants, and he’s a big fan, too:

“Cannas happen to be coarse and gaudy (i.e. striking and bold) so the weak of heart are often afraid to stand up and be seen with them. But there's no reason to be afraid of ‘smash mouth’ plants. To me, cannas are like living garden sculpture. My FAVORITE of all is Canna x iridiflora 'Ehemanii', an old, French, iris-flowered hybrid. It's like a cross between a banana and a fuchsia. And for gardeners who won't grow cannas because of leaf rollers, remember that they’re the larva of the Brazilian skipper butterfly (butterfly haters!) and easy to control with organic Bt, if you want.”

Though we won’t start shipping daffodils, tulips, hyacinths and other fall-planted treasures till October, it’s never too early to start making your plans and wish-lists. We’ve just updated our website with varieties we’re confident we’ll have and will be continually updating it as we receive more information from our growers, so check back over the coming months – and we’ll highlight newly-added varieties often in our newsletter, as usual!

‘Amber Queen’ dahlia

‘Bette Russell’ daylily

‘pallida Dalmatica’ iris

A delight of the winter season is the time it gives gardeners to dream and plan what to grow when the weather warms. As seed catalogs flood your mailbox this month, don’t forget to order your bulbs for spring planting, too! Enjoy a summer garden filled with:

Bouquet-Friendly Dahlias - Last month’s newsletter told you about 6 heirlooms we’re offering for the first time, ranging from 1” pompons through giant dinner-plates. We weren’t sure then if we’d have enough of some of our favorites to offer this year, but we do! Glowing ‘Fatima’, Victorian ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’, peachy ‘Amber Queen’, bee favorite ‘Mrs. H. Brown’, and cheerful ‘Little Beeswing’ are now (while supplies last) available at our website.

Great Glads – Three varieties are small-flowered cuties: perky ‘Elvira’, ruffled ‘Green Lace’, and glorious ‘Starface’. Two are fragrant: ‘Abyssinian’ and ‘Lucky Star’. And the rest are just as fabulous, including the rare ‘Dauntless’, shimmering ‘Nova Lux’, dramatic ‘Plum Tart’, and charming ‘Priscilla’.

Always-Dependable Daylilies - We’re offering 4 new to us this year: evening-blooming ‘Bette Russell’, golden ‘Gertrude Condon’, elegant ‘Purple Waters’, and fetching ‘Winsome Lady’, as well as bringing back past favorites ‘August Pioneer’, ‘Black Friar’, ‘Challenger’, ‘Evelyn Claar’, ‘Marse Connell’, and ‘Melonee’. We rotate our daylily offerings each year, so if you’ve been waiting for one of these, here’s your chance to add it to your collection!

Incredible Iris - We’re so happy to bring back our ‘Small is Beautiful’ sampler for those of you who like shorter iris that combine beautifully with perennials at the front of the border. If you’d rather choose your own selection, we have 13 varieties back this year, including 7 from the 19th century (and ‘pallida Dalmatica’ from 1597!). These are tough survivors often found in old homesteads and graveyards generations after they were planted – if you’re in zone 3-8a with some full sun, why not leave your own legacy of beauty?

And don’t forget to check our Diverse offerings where you’ll find fragrant tuberoses, elegant ‘Ehemanii’ canna (see more below!), starry crocosmia, pixie rain lilies, and our lilies that can’t be shipped in the fall, including dazzling ‘Uchida’ and 1804’s lancifolium ‘Splendens’.

Assuming the weather cooperates, we hope to begin shipping spring orders the first week of April. But order soon: some varieties will sell out quickly - and if you order by March 1, we’ll include an extra something-special of our choice!

This year we’ll be celebrating our 30th anniversary, and we are so grateful to all of you who have shared our passion for Saving the Bulbs! Whether you joined us during our founder Scott Kunst’s tenure, or in the last seven years since Vanessa took the helm, you’ve helped to keep heirloom bulbs in cultivation and to bring beauty to homes and gardens across the country. As our thank-you gift, we’ll be including an extra bulb/tuber/corm/rhizome of our choice to all spring orders received by March 1.