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“I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, American author (The Scarlet Letter, etc.), 1804-1864
We’re sorry this newsletter is reaching you late. Although we’d planned to send it as usual the first week in June, life got in the way.
After wrapping up our very busy spring shipping season and getting our big trial garden planted, Vanessa, Rita, and Justin flew to the Netherlands for a week of meeting with our growers and searching for more old bulbs to add to our catalog. (We’ll have photos and more about this in our July newsletter.)
Meanwhile I spent way too much time working in my newly redesigned flower garden, covering the new paths with weed-cloth and mulch, transplanting the many seedlings I started indoors, and weeding, weeding, weeding.
We hope you understand – and we hope you’ve been happily busy, too!
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While leafing through the August issue of Garden Gate magazine I was happily surprised to see this full-page photo of my favorite small-flowered glad, ‘Starface’. It’s one of seven summer-blooming classics featured in “Top Picks: Heirloom Summer Bulbs.”
“You know a plant is well-loved, timeless, and a good addition to any garden,” writes author Chloe Deike, “when it has been zealously passed on and preserved from generation to generation.” And summer-blooming bulbs are great, she adds, for their “vivid presence, splash of color, and sudden appearance when other plants are starting to whimper and fade.”
Deike describes ‘Starface’ as a “dainty little beauty” whose “ornately patterned petals” have been “stopping gardeners in their tracks since 1960.” Other summer bulbs she praises include:
‘Star of the East’ crocosmia – With its “stouter stems” and “much larger flowers,” this 107-year-old crocosmia “won all kinds of garden awards when it was introduced” and “still has reason to be the star of your garden today.”
‘African Queen’ lily – “Voluminous and voluptuous, this apricot-colored beauty from 1958 sings out like a Broadway diva.”
red spider lily – With its “long, ‘spider-leg’ stamens that curve upward from a cluster of star-shaped flowers,” this dramatic perennial “definitely makes a tropical statement in the late summer garden.”
milk and wine crinum – A “classic pass-along plant in Southern gardens,” milk-and-wine lily “grows happily and blooms off and on throughout the summer without much fuss,” even in pots where it’s not hardy.
‘Café au Lait’ dahlia – Like ‘Starface’, this 1967 beauty also rates a full-page photo in Deike’s article. Its “enormous plush blooms” and “creamy, champagne tone” make it “one of the trendiest flowers for brides” and a “wonderfully celebratory cut flower.”
More than just pretty faces, “heirloom plants are rooted in story,” Deike writes, “embellished by a history that connects you to the past and spurs you toward the future.” And since so many are disappearing from mainstream sources, “growing heirlooms can make you an important link in the chain that keeps these plants thriving.”
You can order two of these treasures – ‘African Queen’ and red spider lily – right now for delivery this fall. The others are spring-planted, though, so they won’t be for sale again until later this summer. For an email alert then, simply click the link in each bulb’s description.
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Interest in the exquisite flowers known as broken tulips continues to grow.
The British magazine Gardens Illustrated, for example, recently published a gorgeously illustrated article about them and their devotees in the 184-year-old Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society.
Broken tulips – or English florists’ tulips, as the British varieties are known – are richly feathered or flamed in red, purple, or mahogany. These are the tulips that sold for mind-boggling sums during Tulipomania in the 1620s.
“There was a time,” writes Anna Pavord (who you may know from her monumental Bulb, The Tulip, and other books), “when almost every town of importance in the north of England had its own tulip society.” Today only the Wakefield group survives, nurturing its rare beauties and exhibiting them in competitive shows as they have every spring since 1835.
The shows are no longer held in pubs as they once were, but the flowers are still displayed in beer bottles. This is as it should be, Pavord says, because “nothing could better set off these gorgeously complex, finely textured blooms than the utilitarian containers of plain brown glass.”
Although the Society was once an all-male bastion, today it includes many women who “regularly win top prizes,” including Teresa Clements who is enthusiastically helping to lead it into the future. “These are tulips that just demand your attention,” she says. “They have an incredible quality. Each is a living antique. They are irresistible.”
As a long-time member, I couldn’t agree more! Learn more about these incredible tulips and – if you want to see for yourself how exciting they can be – check out this complete list of the ones we’re currently offering.
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If you’re not quite ready for peony season to be over – or if you’re already telling yourself that this fall you really are going to add a couple of extra-special ones to your garden – here’s a book you may find both comforting and inspiring.
As I wrote in March about its companion volume, Dahlias, it’s “a gorgeous book, filled to overflowing with spectacular, full page images that are sure to get a gardener’s heart pounding.” These include close-ups of each of the 53 featured varieties as well as shots of peonies blooming en masse in the growers’ fields or artfully combined into exquisite bouquets. Photographer Georgianna Lane is a master at capturing the inner glow and subtle shadings of peonies which makes them come alive on the page.
Although Jane Eastoe’s text is full of historical tidbits, mostly about the diverse breeders who created these well-loved flowers, there are puzzling errors. For example, Eastoe says that ‘Miss America’ is “one of the easiest varieties to propagate by seed,” even though seed-grown peonies virtually never come true from seed, and she describes ‘Karl Rosenfield’ as a peony that should spring to mind when someone says “think pink,” even though ‘Karl Rosenfield’ is usually described as deep red.
Ah, but those magnificent photographs! Although Peonies isn’t a perfect book, I’d say it’s well worth the $16.82 Amazon charges for it.
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