Squill Dreams vs. Squill Reality

Guest photo courtesy of Olivia in Ottawa.

The other night, my friend Olivia emailed me a shot she had taken earlier that day in one of the Public Gardens in Ottawa (where she captures a lot of great shots of flowers). She was pretty sure that it was a patch of the Squill she had seen recently in one of my posts. Sure enough, she had indeed discovered a lovely naturalized drift of this beautiful, yet ephemeral Spring Flower.

I think it's now safe to say that Spring has now (finally!) arrived in Ottawa, after a particularly snowy and brutal winter this year. Yay! Let's hear it for Ottawa and for Olivia, who's been anxiously awaiting the banishment of the snow and the arrival of this year's flowers! And most gracious thanks for allowing me to use this photo on Urban Oasis.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to do a post contrasting what an obviously long established drift of Squill looks like compared to one of our (still) relatively young patches in our front parking grass. Obviously, Olivia's shot is what we dream of our parking looking like one day, but as you can see in the second shot, we've got a long way to go! Though, as I mentioned last night, since we're going to have to put in more bulbs this fall, we might as well get a large quantity of Squill to help "pad" our own drifts. I still suspect we will be waiting a few years for ours to even begin to rival that one Olivia captured so exquisitely ...

I mentioned last night that we are now sure that we lost some bulbs over the winter. With further observation around the neighborhood, as well as some anecdotal accounts, we don't appear to be the only ones who've had some bulbular losses in the garden. An avid gardener who works with Fernymoss told him the other day that she lost lots of daffodils planted on the south side of her house ... they just disappeared and not a one bloomed this year, or even came up. That got us to thinking about one of our neighbors who used to have daffodils and tulips planted on the south side of their house. Go figure, we haven't seen a single daffodil over there this year, and theirs always used to precede ours by a week or two. Nothing this year, and their tulips look pretty spotty as well. It will be interesting to see if this has happened to other gardeners in the area ... but I think it's safe to theorize that that horrible freezing spell we had last year must have had something to do with it. It's a sad reality every gardener faces with all sorts of plants, but losing bulbs has a particular sting to it. Not only are they not particularly "cheap," but they also demand some deep digging for the larger ones, such as tulips and daffodils, which can be challenging when the weather puts you under the proverbial gun in the fall when they need to be planted. Oddly enough, the bulbs that don't require deep digging seem to have really prospered since last year, namely the Squill and Crocus. I have no idea why that would be, given that we lost quite a few of our larger ones, but it does set one to wondering about possible causes ...