Lately, I’ve been taking most of my walks in my Longmont neighborhood. It’s rather charming, with impressive mature trees and mostly older homes, some (like ours) a hundred-year-old or older. Nearly all the houses are what my cousin Charlie, when he visited us from the East Coast, called ‘right-sized’ – neither big nor tiny. A few historic homes that belonged to bankers and wealthy merchants are the exceptions. And with these mostly modest homes, there are a surprising number of quite nice gardens.
But in the past two months, I’ve been searching the neighborhood in vain for displays of spring-blooming bulbs in front yards. A little clump of daffodils here, two or three hyacinths there, and an almost complete absence of crocus, snowdrops, glory-of-the-snow, Siberian squill; no ‘botanical’ iris, no species tulips (except at our friend Leslie’s place). What gives?
Don’t gardeners know how much cheer and delight they bring, for weeks on end? How much they lift our winter-worn spirits, announcing brighter days ahead? They are so cold-hardy that you can really depend on them every year. And they come up every year, with more and more flowers in bigger, longer-lasting clumps. Though no one kind of bloom lasts more than three or four weeks, it’s easy to plant for an exciting sequence of form and jewel-like color. And the show begins about two months before the Forsythia blooms! Yes, you have to plan ahead and buy the bulbs in the fall. So you have five months to think about it.
Our south-facing lot has a 90-foot frontage on a street that’s popular with dog-walkers, cyclists, runners, and strollers. Most years, the bulb show begins in February with various ‘species’ crocus and snowdrops which, after a few weeks, give the limelight to diminutive ‘species’ iris, then narcissus, hyacinths and ‘species’ tulips, and on to more narcissus and bigger tulips and a succession of Alliums (flowering onions). We know, just by watching from the window, that this parade of spring bulbs has made a lot of people visibly happier. Don’t you want to make people happier, too?