More about colchicums

How much rain we’ve been getting:  Our normal rainfall for the past 30 days is 3.05 inches.  As of 4 pm yesterday, we had actually gotten 8.83 inches, and that’s not including yesterday evening’s storms or the rain that fell overnight.  And clouds are once again building in the cool, humid sky as I type.

I got a couple hits overnight via the tag “colchicum” (tagged on yesterday’s post) so I thought I’d write a bit more about them.  Colchicum are often called “autumn crocus” or “autumn-flowering crocus” which I think confuses people into not realizing they are distinct.  Colchicum look rather like very big crocuses, but they come in a different range of colors. The ones commonly available in cultivation tend to be in shades of white, pink, and lavender, sometimes more than one color on a single flower.  A few cultivars have what are descriptively called “waterlily blooms” and those tend to be more expensive than the single blooms.  Most colchicum produce more than one bloom from a single bulb, some species producing up to twenty flowers per bulb.  Depending on species, they can bloom any time from August to October in my climate, and into winter in milder climates.  The flowers tend to last several days and tend to be more weather-resilient than many spring-flowering bulbs.  I discovered last autumn that they seem to be visited regularly by ants.  The ants in my garden were obsessed with the blooms and trekked up and down them all day every day.  However, apparently none of them were pollinated, as in most species the ripening seeds appear with the leaves in spring, and none of mine had seeds this year.

My most successful attempt yet at growing colchicums has been in this garden.  I have them planted by a retaining wall, towards the bottom of a slope.  I mixed compost and gritty material into the bed as I was planting them.  I suggest adding something gritty such as small gravel or crushed oyster shells when you plant them.  I have mine in partial shade, by which I here mean that they are in full sun part of the day, dappled sun (from a tree canopy) part of the day, and full shade part of the day.  Many species of colchicum are native to hilly or mountainous regions (as are many species of crocus and tulip) and they seem to do well in a cool microclimate and on a slope.  Colchicum are so enthusiastic about blooming that if you leave them sitting in a wheelbarrow in the garden for a day, they’ll often bloom just waiting to be planted.

Blooms of colchicum 'Disraeli' in August 2007