Drought Tolerance in Flower Bulbs
The ability for a flower bulb to grow roots, leaves, and eventually bloom often in a dazzling show, only to die back to a self contained vessel capable of possibly going months and even years without water before conditions trigger it to start again, is to me one of the coolest of botanical oddities.
Fritillaria crassifolia from the rugged mountains of Northern Iran
The Britannica dictionary defines tolerance as: 1. willingness to accept feelings, habits, or beliefs that are different from your own. 2 : the ability to accept, experience, or survive something harmful or unpleasant.
This summer with it’s frequent heat waves, has been what I would like to call unpleasant. Strictly speaking of the temperatures though, it’s been a productive and busy one and actually seems to be going by too fast even though I do welcome the cooler temperatures of fall. This week started with showery weather and not just a misting or a passing thunderstorm, this was a solid day and a half of rain and it felt amazing, although unfortunately fleeting. This current heat wave is slated to set another record, the highest low temperature ever recorded for the first of August. One does have to be the title character in a Who rock opera to not see or feel the changes in the garden. This is where the bulbs come into play, Flower bulbs are among the best adapted of the kingdom plantae to the drought conditions of summer here in our modified Mediterranean climate. Some of the bulbs amazing tolerance to dessicated soil conditions continues to boggle my mind, occasionally long after the flower bulbs have shipped out and the catalog is done for the year, I’ll find a package or two in in the bulb storage area. Or the sad and lonely little corm that fell off the shipping table and 6 months later gets swept up into the dust pan, taken outside and planted and in a short period has restarted it’s lifecycle to bloom and leaf and senescence once again.
Some of the amazing adaptations of flower bulbs are the ability to tolerate moist often saturated conditions during the bloom and growth phase and then total desiccation and drought conditions for an entire summer. Bulbs from high mountain meadows where they grow blooming as the last of the snow is melting, sometimes emerging in trickles of frigid water only to spend the summer in bone dry, glacial till dust between rocks when the snow has all melted off. This makes for some easy to cultivate and rewarding to grow flowers that take little in the way of inputs if you can mimic the native growing conditions. The upcoming flower bulb catalog will feature a great selection of tough, hardy and adaptable species bulbs for summer dry gardens. We will also have some selections for those of you whose gardens stay a bit moister through the summer as well.
If everything goes smoothly the catalog should be out by the end of next week. I’ll update again before I get it posted, but if you are a new customer you should know that you can’t wait around to order as many of these treasures of botanical adaptability are in short supply and high demand!
Crocus cartwrightianus ‘Marcel’, a fantastic fall bloomer in the saffron group.
Tune out notice, to the folks who think I just write about plants. Hopefully you unsubscribed after my last tirade so you won’t have to be subjected to my points and views if my words hurt you look away now. Honestly, my goal with just putting thoughts onto a computer screen is that maybe it will open up some sort of a dialogue on how we can improve the planet that we are all stuck on. We don’t have much power or control anymore as poor working class, the political scene has been bought and sold to the highest bidder and we long ago lost our collective power to rally together to effect change despite being more connected to everyone nay tethered if you will through technology. The tolerance that we have for one another as human beings does seem to be pushing itself to the limits during these days of heat, global strife and conflict. I was chuckling to myself to see the conservatives losing their minds over some of french art on display during the opening ceremonies of the olympics. I find that even though Jesus had many teachings on love and acceptance, these days its the right wing of American evangelical “christians” rank among the most intolerant of human beings on this planet. Forcing people to believe is never going to work. And yet the religious right pushes it further and further and we are moving backwards in time based on a book compiled by a bunch of men some 2000 years ago. Have your beliefs and do what you will with them, but listening to the con man say that if Christians show up and vote for him in November it will be the last time anyone ever has to vote again. Makes you wonder where they will draw the line really. The existential threat of Constantine’s sword at your back seems less like a dream. I’ll leave you with this wonderfully poignant Terry Pratchett observation “Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would rather not be a rising ape then a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much for us to flip back into monkey’s again. “
97 degrees currently, with a forecasted low of 70. Too hot for me to tolerate.