The Morning Walkabout

Each morning my day begins with a walk around the garden.  As soon as there is enough light, I take a plastic bag and pick slugs and snails, having found this as effective as using snail bait.  I do use some bait, but I get a rather sinister delight in my daily bag.  I know I should feel pleased when I don't find many, but somehow I am more thrilled when I get a good bag full. 

I have few bulbs in the garden, since gophers are a terrible problem here, plus my land floods in winter, so they either get eaten or rot.  I do have some clumps of Dierama, the lovely South African hairbell, though.  They are mostly hybrids bought from nurseries, since I don't sell Dierama at present.  I used to, but they dislike disturbance and have to be sold in pots, and I don't have enough room at the moment.  Here is the lovely white one.

It is hard to tear myself away from the garden this time of year, but I must, since we are starting to harvest the bulbs, Oxalis being the first on the list, followed by some other South Africans, with the California natives being the last.  Harvesting goes on well into July, and it is a very dusty, dirty and messy job.  I have two young helpers, both pretty as spring flowers themselves, and eager workers.

After the daily slugfest I inspect the greenhouses, and was thrilled to find a bud appearing on my fourteen year old Boophone haemanthoides.  I have waited so long for this!!  I am so excited that I couldn't wait to post a picture of it in bloom, and simply had to show you the bud, with my hand to demonstrate the size.  Fourteen years is a long time, and you certainly need patience to be a bulb grower.  Some Brunsvigias take even longer.  I have Crossyne and Brunsvigia bulbs that are almost as old as this and I am still waiting.

Chlorogalum pomeridianum might not be as exciting as Boophone haemanthoides, but I like this bulb very much, and feel it is vastly underappreciated.  It grows in the foothills of the mountains in California, and opens its starry white flowers in the evening, staying open until dawn.  When I lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, I would drive home from work at dusk in early summer, and see their beautiful plumes glowing in the half light under the scattered blue oaks.  The landscape at dusk looks like an etching, the golden hills turning to silver with the canopies of the oaks a lacy black, and if there was a moon the six foot tall plumes of Chlorogalum seemed phosphorescent.  The one shown here, C. pomeridianum v. minus, is much shorter at about 24 inches. I have found it difficult to photograph, and have finally got a decent picture, but I will never have a picture like the one in my memory of acres of them glowing in the moonlight.  This is a bulb that is used by Native Americans to make beautiful little brushes, and you can read more of this under Native American Uses of Bulbs.

I am still pollinating the California native bulbs, and it looks good this year for seed.  The later flowering Calochortus are opening their buds now, so here to end this post is a picture of Calochortus gunnisoni.

 

www.telosrarebulbs.com

Comments

[Mark W. Brown]

I really like this green centered white form of Calochortus gunnisoni.Is it a named form? A collection? I would love seeds if at all possible?
Kind regards,
Mark