The Verdict in the Crocus Case

A week ago, I was kind of excited about the crocuses that were popping up in a few spots in the perennial border. It's hard not to get excited about such an early bloomer — they command an out-sized portion of attention for their size since there's nothing else around to look at when they open. 

Now that I've moved beyond my initial, culturally ingrained cooing response, I've been able to focus more clearly on the problem with these crocuses. First, they are messing up my color scheme:

In this picture you can see how the random assortment of white, purple, and purple striped crocuses clash with the blue Siberian squill to the right of the photo. This might look ok if there were lots of shades ranging in that cool zone of blue and purple, but my plan was to work with yellow, orange, and blue. And the beauty of all those little squill bulbs is that they are a real true-blue. If you are at all a fan of flower gardening, you know how hard that is to find. And I don't want to mess it up.

Now that daffodils are opening too, you can get an idea of what I wanted to do, color-wise:

You'll have to use your imagination to try to combine these two photos to "see" the purple crocuses mixed in with the daffodils and squill, but I can see it just fine, and I am not a fan. In a few more years the squill will naturalize to fill in even more, and the beginnings of this "river" along the front of the border should be something really special:

Also, many of the crocuses are in bad spots, interfering with other perennials:

Still, I was willing to dig them up gently and find a new spot for them. This is why I'd let them go for over a week, by the way — I was trying to figure out somewhere to put them where we could enjoy them to save some perfectly nice flowers. I finally decided to put them by the workshop door, where I have a mini-border of other things that we salvaged from the perennial border as we renovated it last summer.

And you know what? When I went to dig them up, the corms were so deep that I couldn't get them up without breaking off the leaves and leaving the corm behind. Crocuses are only supposed to be planted about four inches down, and these were easily eight (which probably explains why most didn't flower). After trying oh-so-carefully to save the first 10 or so, these stupid little flowers that aren't that pretty and don't last very long were pissing me off. I ended up ripping up all of them without regard for their corms. I am hoping that getting all their leaves will kill most of them so they don't come up again (since the corms won't  be able to store the photosynthesized energy from the leaves). The science behind that should be solid, but we all know that it's nearly impossible to get rid of a plant you don't want, and much harder to keep those you do.

Stupid crocuses.