Okay. Fall doesn't suck as much as I thought. Thank you crocuses!

Crocus speciosus* 

I know, I know: I've heard the litany "Fall is my FAVORITE season, so mellow, so soft, so gentle... the trees are even more colorful than Spring!" Fiddlesticks. Fall means Winter, which REALLY Sucks. Fall means damn leaves all over the place for weeks and months. It means it gets dark really early and stays dark late. Fall means cleanup and and and--then what? But then the corps de Ballet of Crocus speciosus begins their dance. In a prior post, with lots of better pictures of this, I suggested they reminded me of  Gluck's dance of the blessed spirits--which fortuitously was playing on our local NPR classical station this morning on my way to work. If you didn't click on the FIRST link, the second will take you to the Gluck--which I suggest playing as a background to these pictures (and perhaps on through Fall and the rest of your life). 

Crocus pulchellus

 

In cultivation this is usually much paler than C. speciosus, but I noticed that when I looked it up on I-Naturalist, a lot of the photos showed plants as dark and otherwise very similar to its more easterly cousin. This species is centered mostly on the Balkans, especially Greece.

We once had a wonderful colony of this at Denver Botanic Gardens that has diminished due to other plants encroaching, perhaps. But I am thrilled to have re-created that colony at the base of one of my rock gardens...I will do what I can to help these persist and spread. These are my autumnal balm, after all...

Colchicum boissierri

Now for a little story (I do have a lot of those, don't I?) I obtained this in 2006 (almost 20 years ago) from Jane McGary. It is either C. procurrens or C. boissieri (I purchased both from her that year--and in any case--they are now synonymized under the latter name. For a "stoloniferous" plant, it's not sending stolons out very fast! I took this one sunny day a week or so ago.

Same plant yesterday--under slightly overcase skies. A lot more flowers. Which is why gardening is so gratifying and fun. The garden changes from minute to minute as light shifts, and let's not talk about weeks, months or years.

A lot of colchicums bloomed last month while I was gallivanting around China, Washington D.C., Las Vegas and Dallas (to name the places I remember) so I missed even seeing them. I have had a half dozen or so crocuses also bloom. But there are always a few more waiting in the wings, to come out and do their dance and cheer me up. I have to admit, it's been a refulgent fall so far. I'm reconsidering.

*If you hadn't realized it by now, I'm a big fan of I-Naturalist (you can even follow my posts on that website at the bottom of my Blog Posts!). But I want to register a HUGE complaint about the Website. All sorts of idiots are posting their GARDEN pictures on the site--which really diminishes its usefulness in my opinion. Check out Crocus speciosus--which seems to have two major concentrations of distribution. The wild ones ring the Black Sea, while all the Northern and Western European are garden plants (and a few yahoos in the USA). I would LOVE it if the Garden photos were a DIFFERENT  COLOR so you knew they weren't wild. I realize the Man/Nature dichotomy is perhaps imaginary--but I'm not quite ready to subsume Mother Nature into the Anthropocene altogether yet. End of another rant. I rant a lot in autumn.