March 2012

I guess I’ve never asked myself, nor has anyone asked me: what is my favorite perennial? If asked my favorite flower, I’d say have to say: tulip. If asked my favorite tree, I’d have to say: willow. If asked my favorite vegetable, I’d have to say: cabbage. Ask me again in come fall , and I’d have to say: New England aster, sugar maple and butternut squash. And then there are the many plants on which I cast my gaze on any given day and announce my favorite: camellias, oaks, flowering cherries, snapdragons, chard…. you get my drift.

Favorite is a very exclusive position. There is only one. Unless you amend and say: my 3 favorite flowers, my 5 favorite trees, my 10 favorite perennials. Of course, I would, no doubt, place these favorites in order of favorite-ness and  #1 would be my favorite among the favorites. That’s why I like mixed borders, meadows, woodlands and prairies. They become in-exclusive wholes.

When I began putting a perennial class together for Molbak’s Garden + Home ( April 1, 11:30-12:30) I sifted through my photos, my notes and my very cluttered brain for some favorites, a favorite, if it were possible to decide.

My favorite, at least this month, is Pulmonaria sacchata ‘Margery Fish’. In one garden I made over 10 years ago I planted it as filler. I liked pulmonarias, but I didn’t love pulmonarias, would never have put them on a favorites list back then. I was younger had more of a taste for the unique and difficult; a taste for robust reds, yellows and oranges, not the noddingly pink and polka dotted. I planted pulmonarias anyway, I knew they are good perennials.

But as I become more of a gardner, which means I want to do less gardening, I’m considering pulmonarias great. Especially ‘Margery Fish’, which has rocketed to the top of my favorite perennials list.

Why?

Well… first and foremost is the foliage with its boraginous bristle and polka dots. Nearly evergreen in the Pacific Northwest I only give them 2 tidying trims a year and for 12 months they look great. After their blooming season, which lasts from end of February to mid-June here most years, I give them a hard whack with a hedging shears They bounce back quickly and look fresh until January when snow, rain and frost have finally won the battle against the incredibly sturdy foliage. At that time I literally rip off the old foliage making sure to not damage the new growth and flower buds. They are stars in the spring garden before the tulips begin for which they make a great back-up band, in summer their foliage takes on a tropical appearance especially when paired with coleus or begonias.

And come fall as the speckled toad lilies spill over them they move back up my favorite list, yet if you’d asked me then I’d say ‘September Ruby’ asters are.

When I traveled south in early February it was not only to escape the drudgery of winter gardening, but to get out of winter itself, skip over spring and land smack-dab in the middle of summer.

Boy, did I get a surprise.

Mexico City where Michael and I spent the first week of our trip was chilly and rainy, like Seattle in April. Well, maybe a tad warmer. Mexico City is only 19°26” north of the equator, but it sprawls out on a plateau which at it’s lowest is 7,217 feet above sea level. Taking in the mountains and volcanos that surround it, it leaps to an altitude of over 12,000 feet. It’s like being on a mountain top to us valley-dwellers, whose home is only about 60 feet above sea level. I knew I would not be landing in the tropics, nor the deserts neither that make up a large portion of Mexico. I knew I wasn’t leaving North America. I was even warned, “It could be cool at night,” so I thought I was ready with my corduroy sports coat and some thermal t-shirts.  And I was ready. For the weather.

What I wasn’t ready for were the tulips.

I have been growing, or at least watching tulips grow since I can remember. They were probably one of the first miracles of gardening I witnessed as a child. My mother would dig a hole, drop in—actually she was probably more careful than that—a brown bulb not unlike an onion, it would sit in our cold Wisconsin clay that could freeze up to 2 feet deep and then burst out of the ground in spring with such vigor, such joy and such color that I couldn’t help but be in awe. I plant tulips every year now. For my clients and myself.

Anyway, when I think of tulips I think of Holland, of course, and Holland, Michigan, and the Skagit Valley north of Seattle emblazoned with tulips each April and clogged with cars full of slow moving gawkers. But I don’t think of Mexico. When I think of Mexico I think of palms and orchids, acres of philodendrons crawling across the ground and poinsettias like trees. Everything you would need a conservatory here to grow.

Our Mexican friends Alberto and Memo were “freezing to death”, while Michael and I were comfortable in the slightly warmer-and-drier-than-Seattle-in-April  temperatures. But they were also great sports and marched us from one end of the spectacular city to the other. When I came home and finally opened a map I realized we had only seen about 2% of the over 570 square miles that make up the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. We saw superlative architecture, we saw millions of friendly people (there are nearly 22 million in the metropolitan area); we saw incredible wealth and horrible poverty; we ate lavishly and cheaply; we saw palms; poinsettias and philodendrons galore; and we saw tulips.

I never think of places with no snow to speak of, no freezing temperatures, no January thaw, as having winter and therefore as having spring.  Spring is a defiant act against winter, a force to reckon with. As you know I still have a hard time with the Pacific Northwest’s hazy seasons weaving in and out of each other willy-nilly. But it was spring in Mexico. And February 2nd, Dia de la Candelaria —Candlemas to us English speakers, or Ground hogs day— is a particularly important spring festival there. And a time for giving tulips. So tulips abounded at ever street corner flower stall, in the markets and super markets, in hotel lobbies, in restaurants and in cathedrals.

Tulips are in a strange way a very modern flower. The ancient Greeks who were formidable botanist failed to mention them as did many of the herbalist of the day. It wasn’t until the 1400s that tulips began their sometimes maddening ascent to fame and popularity. Now at anytime of year here you can buy a bouquet of tulips. Every Fourth of July I have to chuckle at the bouquets of red, white and blue ( okay, lavender) tulips that turn up at the grocery store en mass. Nothing says America like tulips.

If you have grown tulips you know that they need a good chill to set flower buds. My gardening friends in California, who grew up back east, confess to missing them as they stand among their aloes blazing with flowers in March. What is the allure of the tulip, and how did it catch the Mexican imagination? They can’t possible grow them there with out the complications of chilling them to set the flower buds. So I googled “Mexican Tulips”: all that came up was the Mexican tulip poppy (Hunnemannia fumariifolia), not a tulip at all but definitely a poppy relative. Were all these tulips coming north or south from cooler places to Mexico City? Where there great refrigerated greenhouse pumping them in the outskirts of the city? Were they flown in from Holland? I know I was on vacation and should have been enjoying myself, not puzzling over tulip propagation, but one of the things I enjoy is flowers and in particular tulips and nothing is better to me than to feed my curiosity. And still my curiosity had not been satisfied. Maybe I need another trip to Mexico City and a little more Spanish under my belt to find out where all those Mexican tulips come from.

What I did find is I am not alone in my reverence of flowers, in the joy I take in them, in my celebration of spring ( we’re still waiting, vaguely, in the Northwest)  And that I am not alone in my love of tulips.

Even taggers got the tulip bug.