Season Blossoms in the Hills
Spring has tossed in her petals in the Linda Vista Hills like a no-tomorrow gambler.
Even my crotchety hill has never looked so handsome. The roses are as big as lettuces, and even Mandy’s cymbidiums are theatrically ruffled. We inherited the cymbidiums six years ago, along with Mrs. Goldfarb the cat, because Mandy, Patsy’s daughter, and her husband were off to Japan on a tour of duty. Mandy didn’t think either the plants or the old lady cat would live through the requisite quarantine, so they became our foster charges.
I haven’t wanted to tell you but with everything in exuberant bloom, I feel you are strong enough to hear that dear Mrs. Goldfarb with the green grape eyes, has nipped off quickly and painlessly with a heart attack. No one knew how old she was because she adopted Mandy 17 years before she died and she was a young lady cat then. Patsy and I were consoled because we had managed to give the old lady six years of pampering and quiet. When she lived with Mandy’s family, she contended with four kids and three Samoyeds. At our house, all she had to put up with was an occasionally tidy kiss from Peaches.
The cymbidiums were not as adjustable. They hunkered down in their pot and didn’t do anything for four years. One day, our esteemed and treasured friend, Dr. Arvid Underman, was at the house and looked sadly at the pouting flowers. He kindly took them home to his greenhouse where he raises exotic blooms of great beauty and ministers to malcontents belonging to other people. He separated Mandy’s cymbidiums, which were living in woefully overcrowded, substandard conditions, and placed them in three different pots. This year, for the first time in their lives, they are flinging forth great garlands of flowers.
The irises I planted on the driveway hill are vying to see which one can produce the most ruffled blooms. I love them all but the lemon yellow with the bright orange center and the chocolate brown are probably my favorites.
Even the azaleas are blooming. (I know other people have great mounds of azaleas every year but I never have.) And the kolenchoe, the breath of spring and the amaryllis are loaded with blossom.
I know this isn’t a patch on what other people have every year but for me, who has growing trouble with everything except one giant, aboriginal known to us as the geranium that ate Pasadena, it’s a veritable fairyland of bloom.
I carefully pulled up the tulip bulbs a week or so ago when they stopped blooming. Tulips are gorgeous but they are niggardly with their flowers. One flower to a stalk and that’s it. I have always been told to refrigerate the bulbs so the dumb things will think they are slumbering in the dark cool of the forest and be ready to be put in the ground in the fall, where they will bloom in the early spring. I have never been able to make that work.
Someone--Doug, Tim, Patsy or maybe old Green Thumb herself--has always thrown them out during the winter months, thinking they were long-tailed onions or just because of boredom with looking at them. Last winter, Patsy threw them in a stew by mistake, and although I am not suggesting this is a gourmet fillip, we didn’t know the difference. Recently, I read an article by a tulip specialist who said to toss the bulbs out and start all over again in the fall.
I am sorry to say that I have nothing for a garden encore. When these pretty things are finished, it’s back to geraniums and roses for the rest of the year. Actually, that’s not too bad. The rose bushes get to be big, hulking brutes with thorns like Malay daggers and have blooms until they are pruned in January.
Happy springtime, everybody, and I think I’ll just go ahead and throw out the tulip bulbs right now.
