By Lois Barber
They are gone by now, but my faithful little friends, the crocus flowers of early spring, were the only sign of the season for the longest time during this year’s unusually cold March and April.
I was happy to see them one afternoon as I pulled into my driveway, but when I woke up the next day to below-freezing temperatures, I expected to find the little purple flowers lying lifeless on the ground. Instead, they stood up all over the lawn, proudly defying the weather.
How do they do it? How do these tiny flowers remain in bloom, sometimes even through a snow?
The exterior of crocus flowers and leaves is surrounded by a waxy cuticle. Crocuses have the added protection of being poisonous to deer and other wildlife, allowing them to flower in your garden when no other flower dares to.
Plant crocuses in full sun or partial shade in the fall. I prefer to grow my crocus throughout the lawn, rather than in flower beds, because when I plant them in a flower bed, I am forever digging them up by accident. The flowers are gone by the time the lawn mower cuts the grass for the first time.
A landscape architect taught me this trick to naturalizing – toss the bulbs into the air, then plant them wherever they land. My tip – do NOT do this with crocus bulbs. I tried it once and spent at least an hour searching for them because of the small size of their corms. Save this trick for daffodils, with their larger bulbs.
Lois Barber writes and takes photographs for a weekly gardening column for the Republican-American newspaper in Waterbury, CT.