Beautiful Bulbs to Plant Now for a Spectacular Spring

[Michie]

I have a lot of flower memories, but some of my most vivid ones include images of blooms springing miraculously from unassuming bulbs and tubers. The Black Dragon lily, for instance, that my mother nurtured into a Little-Shop-of-Horrors-enormous specimen that won a blue ribbon from the Garden Club of Virginia. Or the spidery pink surprise lilies she divided from plants that belonged to my grandmother. Or the yellow daffodils that pop up around my parents’ house every year, including the five-inch-wide Chromacolor variety first hybridized by the gifted daffodil savant Bill Pannill just a few blocks up the road from us in my tiny Virginia hometown.

But mostly I think about Mom’s peonies, and a research trip I took with her to bring back new varieties for her collection when I was in high school. At a time when most teenagers rebel, I willingly and enthusiastically jumped in the car with her and drove an ungodly number of hours to Delaware to tour the gardens at Winterthur. The bulbs we brought home two decades ago still inspire awe, and if I’m lucky enough to visit my parents in the springtime, I haul big fragrant buckets of the cut blooms back to Charleston—a locale far too humid for their sensitive temperaments.

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Beautiful Bulbs to Plant Now for a Spectacular Spring