An Iowa Garden

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Henry Mitchell, in his best-known book The Essential Earthman has this to say about hybrid crocuses: "Let us have no more talk about 'fat Dutch crocuses'... as if the gardener loved only the slender, elegant wild crocuses... unfed, unbred, and untouched by the Dutch. The truth is that nothing is more sprightly to see than patches of fat Dutch crocuses in March, coming as they do to lift our spirits and amaze the young and simple."
Well, the Dutch hybrid crocuses in our garden never fail to lift my spirits and amaze me, and I'm not young, so...
Anyway, I probably wouldn't have planted "fat Dutch crocuses" in our garden at all (I HAVE gotten to be a little bit of a plant snob), but my sister-in-law was selling boxes of flower bulbs for her church, so I ended up with the Super Assortment of a hundred crocus bulbs, which arrived very late one fall when there was already snow on the ground. The bulbs were hurriedly stuck in the ground wherever it was not frozen, and promptly forgotten about. Well, every year now these amazing crocuses come up in larger and larger clumps all over the garden, their colors as clear and pure as in a garden dream.



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