Re-cyclamen!

That's me in case you wondered what I looked like! I don't show that many images of myself, so I figured it wasn't TOO egotistical to feature myself once out of ten or fifteen thousand images on Praireiebreak....and those are some hefty corms of Cyclamen hederifolium in my hands.

In case you're curious how long it takes for a Cyclamen to make a corm like this, I can shed a little light on the subject. The specimen above blooming in my hand and the ones below that were done blooming all came from Mrs. Fisher, who had one of the loveliest gardens in Colorado. No end of bulbs in spring, wild flowers like anemones and trilliums. From the time I was eight or ten I'd go there up to Baseline road (two blocks south of my house) where she lived and would peer over the wall at her garden. One day she noticed me and invited me in. After that I'd ring the doorbell at propitious moments spring and fall, and we'd chat and enjoy her garden together. The years went by and once in my thirties I got a call from her daughters: they said Mrs.Fisher wanted me to dig up whatever plants I wanted when she died. She had passed away and her family remembered. I dug up the largest cyclamen in the garden (five or six)--mind you this was thirty plus years ago! They could well have been that old already when I dug them...

These are those very tubers--dug again yesterday. My brother-in-law Earl Sampson passed away a few months ago. The family home full of 65 years of memorabilia is being lovingly catalogued and distributed by my nieces. Not knowing what will happen to either the garden or the house once it's sold, I decided to dig the cyclamen--the self same corms! Perhaps in Italy or Greece they may grow to this size much faster, but on the cold, dry steppe of Colorado (albeit somewhat shielded from the worst), a Cyclamen corm grows to six or eight inches across in half a century,

As  October winds down to its last weeks the garden takes a well earned rest. I especially appreciate the foliage on Arum italicum 'Marmoratum' all fresh and new, just in time for our first hard frost a week or so ago! Of course, this grows with cyclamen in the wild as well...

And this Japanese Allium is looking pretty spiffy as well--and has been blooming for weeks on end: even through our cold snap when the temperature dropped to 17F. Which is as good as anything to end this blog post.