Maybe I have a flower porn problem

Jill Severn

Photo by Anna Schlecht

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a hard to find variety of meadow rue from Breck’s website. Soon after, a Breck’s flower catalogue appeared in my mailbox, and the next hour was taken up by price shock, longing, and opinionated objections.

To buy everything that struck my fancy, I’d need to rob a bank and then buy an acre to plant it all. Alas, my fantasy life is rich, but I am not.

So let’s start with the opinionated objections, which are free: Hybridizers (meddling plant breeders) continue to mess up perfectly good plants. Coneflowers, for instance. These tall, long-blooming pinkish/lavender summer flowers are beloved by people and bees, and their seed-heads are a favorite of small birds. They are already perfect. But in the past few years they’ve been turning up in odd colors, and now Breck’s has one that is a lurid pink, another that is white, and both have frilly double flowers. To one who feels loyalty to the original, the double-flowered-ness, even more than the colors, feels like a betrayal.

To add to the outrage, they are on sale for $19.99 per plant, down from the original price of $49.99. That made me want to fling the catalogue into the recycling bin.

But I didn’t. The pull of full-color fantasy was too strong. Maybe I have a flower porn problem.

There are so many plants I’ve still never grown. Of the zillions of varieties of hostas, for instance, I have only three. Breck’s has a new one with white leaves that turn pale green over the course of the growing season, and another with bright yellow leaves and stems as red as rhubarb. There’s also a brunnera, also known as bugloss, that has gigantic, hosta-like variegated leaves. (I have a “normal” small brunnera with long-lasting blue flowers in the late spring. It’s been in a shady spot by the chicken coop for about twenty years.) 

Breck’s also has anemones galore. These easy to grow, smallish, sun-loving flowers also bloom in late spring, and are a more reasonable price: $11.99 for 25 bulbs. (Many other anemone bulbs are available in stores now.) I have no room for them, but want them anyway.

The plant breeders have also been hard at work on daylilies, which are now available in more than their traditional yellow-to-orange colors. Purple, pink and white are now on offer, with contrasting leaf margins and yellow centers. And these all promise to bloom repeatedly in the course of a summer – a genuine improvement over the one-and-done blooming of older varieties. That’s an instance of hybridizers doing something good for a change.

Cyclamens – small, shade-loving flowers that grow from fat, oddly flattened bulbs – have also come in for renewed attention. These bulbs sprout foliage in in the winter that dies back in the late spring. After the leaves disappear it goes dormant for the summer. Its delicate flowers are a pleasant surprise when they suddenly appear about the first of September, and they last through the late fall. They are a great choice for planting under trees, preferably in a spot not likely to be disturbed. (Mine have somehow survived disturbances that happened during their dormant time, when I forgot they were there.)

If you plant cyclamen, there’s a pretty good chance they will outlive you. There were some in my yard at the foot of a clothesline post when I moved here, and I suspect they may have been planted soon after the house was built in 1927. I imagine that whoever planted them enjoyed them while she hung up her laundry.

What I set out to say, though, is that Breck’s now has a mix of cyclamen bulbs that it claims will provide flowers over six months, from late summer to early spring. I had to remind myself that I don’t have room for these either.

Thumbing through that catalogue was a mix of pleasure, irritation and inspiration – which was more than enough to start my engine for the garden year ahead. Now I will toss it into the recycling and go visit the local seed racks instead.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com