Garden Fairies Discuss Crocuses in the Fall

Garden fairies here.

We are garden fairies and it has come to our attention that someone is telling people that her autumn crocuses— which were absolutely gorgeous in late October before the killing frosts came—are the result of her magical gardening powers.

Um. No. We are garden fairies. They are because of our hard work and the fortunate choice Carol made in planting Crocus speciosus many years ago. Really, her part in all of this took all of about 10 minutes several years ago.

Since then, we garden fairies have been pushing up and opening these crocus blooms, usually around Halloween. And Seedy and Soddy especially have also worked at increasing the number of blooms. There are so many now that it is almost like spring!

We are garden fairies, and we will admit it is impressive to see crocuses blooming in the fall like this. We hope Carol buys some more to plant in front where more people can see them. We have put a reminder on her Trello board for her to order them in the spring for late summer planting, as one does.

But wait! There are crocus in bloom in a front yard garden bed right now too.

These are Crocus sativus, saffron crocuses. Unlike the autumn crocuses that send up foliage in the spring and bloom in the fall, the saffron crocuses do it all in the fall—leaves and blooms. So much work for garden fairies!

This means that hungry rabbits have foliage to eat in the fall, as you can see from the above picture showing the crocus foliage chewed to nubbins.

We are garden fairies. We can not, will not, shall not ever take responsibility for the rabbits and what they do or don’t do in this garden. We just hope the lack of foliage doesn’t mean the end of these flowers in the coming years. We think it doesn’t. We are garden fairies.

And that is all we want to share today. As noted above, we’ve had a killing frost or two so now we are busy with the last of the fall leaf color and prepping the Christmas roses for their winter show.

Oh, and someone please remind Carol that those bags of 500 Crocus tommasinianus corms and 500 Chionodoxa bulbs aren’t going to plant themselves in the back lawn and elsewhere. That’s up to her!

Submitted by:

Violet Greenpea MayDreams, Chief Scribe and Head of the More Bulbs Mean More Flowers Committee here at May Dreams Gardens