Seriously.  If anyone has ever considered abducting me, all it would take is a white van and the promise of a plant inside.  What!?  You have a variegated clematis in there?  Move over, let me see…

Within days of starting a conversation about bulbs with a new online friend, I was convinced Crinum lilies were missing from my life and I needed a few.  A week later a (quite heavy) box from Jenks Farmer shows up on my porch and I’m tearing up the garden making room for a bulb or three.

The Crinum bulbs which showed up were huge.  I was so excited I made sure every vaguely disinterested family member had an opportunity to admire them and hear a little about them.  They seemed very grateful.

It’s not easy just squeezing a cantaloupe sized bulb which needs several square foot of space, into a fairly full perennial border, but I no longer even pretend to worry about it.

Realistically, four square feet of space would be a good start for planting a small crinum.  Obviously this bed has quite a few four foot gaps which need filling 😉

I worry about stupid things instead.  There were a few grassy threads of something which looked like allium seedlings in the spot where the one crinum should have gone.  I’d really like them to be allium seedlings, but they’re too small to risk moving so of course I planted the $40 crinum in a second best spot crammed between a hellebore and penstemon in a spot which was unavailable until I moved the 90 pound “landscape” stone out of the way.  I thought this was the best option rather than risk anything happening to the six or seven tiny weeds which maybe have a 15% chance of become amazing alliums in another half decade or so…

Crinum powellii album nestled into its new home.  It might be an expensive annual this far North, but the bulb is huge and if all goes well maybe a single flower stalk will grace the garden before winter smashes all my dreams of global warming granted hardiness.

Let me just mention the alliums quickly. They’re three bulbs of Allium karataviense ‘red and pink hybrids’, and even at 50% off during a late November clearance sale, they were still kind of costly.  Not snowdrop-costly but still kind of pricey when you consider they’re basically just onions with an ego.  Of course they’re too self-important to bother splitting and multiplying, but maybe those seedlings are a start.

I think their broad, water-repelling foliage is very cool in itself, but the flowers aren’t too shabby either.  I suspect these are hybrids based on Allium karataviense ssp henrikii, but that’s only if you really want to make your onions sound fancy.

I’m going to apologize now for going on and on about tulips again.  A short post mentioning some new crinum bulbs was the plan, but then I got tulips on my brain again, and well…

The hot colored tulips mark the last stage of the front border’s spring flush.  It will face a short lull now as (I hope) the summer bloomers come along, but for now it’s awesome.  Also please note it’s been an excellent dogwood year 🙂

In case you haven’t noticed, my garden follows manias, and I’m sensing another tulip mania coming on.  Bulbs will be dug, moved, stored, replanted… and hopefully next year there will be even more tulip excitement!  Unless of course some epimedium thing or bearded iris obsession develops, you never know.  Sometimes I like to consider how nice this garden could look if the gardener would only focus and organize, but obviously that hasn’t happened and instead I always opt for “interesting”, even if it’s only interesting for me 🙂

I think black tulips are interesting.  The gray leaves of Scotch thistle are also interesting, as well as the weedy yellow roadside mustard behind them.  I think I should let the mustard go to seed and check those out for spiciness, that might also be pretty interesting!

Awesome is also a good option.  Some of the tulips rate pretty high on the awesomeness index.

No idea on the name of these luscious cherry with orange flowers, but they rate awesome.  The white with red flames behind aren’t too bad either, they came in a mix and I believe they’re the tulip ‘Happy Generation’.

The one new tulip purchase for this year were the antique ‘broken’ tulips purchased through Old House Gardens.  If they return next year I’m sure you’ll see too much of them, but for this year the five single bulbs I planted are more of an obsession rather than an amazing landscape show.  An obsession because of the beautiful, virus-induced patterning and its connection to the raging tulipmania of the 17th century, and just plain interesting because of the great age of these cultivars.  The ones planted this year range in age from one to three hundred years old!

The solid color of these tulips has been ‘broken’ by a virus they carry.  I shall keep them away from other tulips (and true lilies) and hope for the best.

As I was considering how old the tulips were I kinda felt a little old myself.  There I was admiring the nice blue mat of what I think is Polemonium reptans and I realized I’ve been tending this plant in some way or another for over forty years.  It was growing in the garden of my parent’s house 51 years ago when they bought it and it’s one of the first things I realized I could move and divide and not end up killing.

I don’t know if this is plain old Polemonium reptans or some selection or some other species or hybrid, but it just keeps chugging along year after year.  Never sets a single seed, but slowly creeps along.

Things that I can’t kill are good to have.  They say Crinum lilies are next to impossible to kill so that’s promising, but any idiot knows that winters here are cold, and considering that I know winters here are cold, that may explain my decision to plant them…

It’s been pouring rain today.  I made a point of photographing the primula sieboldii yesterday as a memory of what they looked like before they drowned.

So as usual we will see where these questionable decisions lead.  Container crinums would likely be a smarter choice but then I would have to find a big enough container and that might be even more trouble than dealing with the loss of yet another borderline plant.  In any case if I hedge my bets with a bunch more tulip plantings this fall I’ll have plenty to keep me happy in case the other stuff fails, so obviously my apparent madness is actually a well devised plan of attack.

Hahahaha, sure it is. Have a great week, and remember to stay away from those white vans, even if they say they’re full of rare violets and hosta  😉