The lockdowns have been hard on old friends, banning meetings and turning them into virtual realities. In the garden they have done the opposite. Each week brings old friends back in the flowery calendar. Their reappearance is wonderful, one of the sustaining sights in this hard year.
Snowdrops, winter sweet, hellebores and aconites are among those that have never looked better, a counterpoint to empty streets and shops and masked people hurrying on limited business. They are all lovely but none is better than the crocus. So, hello, crocus, my old friend.
Old is the word for them. The root of the word “crocus” goes back to ancient Sanskrit in India and then turns up in Hebrew further west. From the Levant it passed to the Greek world in the second millennium BC.
The father of Alexander the Great, King Philip, won a great battle in Thessaly in northern Greece in the year 352BC on a site called the Crocus Field. The flowers may have been over but the subsequent years’ display ought to have been better than ever, thanks to the blood and bone of the many casualties. I imagine them as yellow crocuses, possibly Crocus aureus, on a field like a shroud of gold.
Even earlier, saffron crocuses were being tended and gathered on the volcanic island of Santorini. As early as c1700BC, scenes of women gathering saffron crocus appear on the amazing wall frescoes found on the island in the 1960s. They remain one of the great discoveries of my lifetime.
The exact identity of the autumn crocus depicted is still disputed, but the ultimate touch of Bronze Age fashion is the presence of crocus flowers on the sleeves of some of the ladies’ dresses. They ought to be copied and marketed for millennials next autumn.
In city parks, nearly 4,000 years later, crocuses are flowering by the thousands. White and purple-blue crocuses on the slopes below the Round Tower of Windsor Castle used to be my benchmark of the start of spring. The carpets of yellow and purple-blue crocuses around London’s Marble Arch are an alternative marker.
Snowdrops do not need sunshine to look their best. Crocuses unfurl in it, the essential accompaniment to make them look their best.
Purists used to deplore the big flowers on Dutch hybrid crocuses and selected varieties of the spring crocus, Crocus vernus. They preferred the more delicate flowers on species crocus from the wild varieties with subtle feathering or striping on their petals and a slender flower bud. When the big-flowered ones close up on dull days, they do not have the elegance of wild crocuses, whose flowers roll up like tight umbrellas.
The great connoisseur of the crocus was EA Bowles in his garden at Enfield in Middlesex, where he grew hundreds of different varieties, separating their seedlings with a brand of kitchen fork he used to buy in Army & Navy stores. He described the usual hybrid crocuses as rolling up, not like umbrellas, but “gamps”. He has kept that fine word alive for me.
Crocuses have not, I think, left much of a legacy in classic English poetry, unless they are autumn-flowering saffron crocuses. In this bicentennial year of his death, white and purple-blue crocuses are flowering beautifully in the garden of Keats House in Hampstead. He never made much
of them in his poems. Some of his successors did, but missed the target.
In America, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr presented the flower in his poem Astraea as “The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould/ Naked and shivering with his cup of gold.” Crocuses usually flower before their leaves are developed and they also keep their ovaries down at ground level.
In his Modern Painters, John Ruskin shredded Wendell Holmes’ verses. He complained that the crocus is a hardy flower, not a spendthrift, and that its flower is saffron yellow, not gold: he was writing before many of the gold spring crocuses in nature were widely known or grown.
He classed poor old Wendell Holmes as an example of the pathetic fallacy, the ascribing of feelings to items in nature that do not have them. The crocus verses were an example, he declared, of “wilful fancy”, expressed with “no real expectation that it will be believed”. I try, and fail, to remember Ruskin whenever I write a gardening column.
Spendthrift or not, in gardens the crocus is at constant risk from British wildlife. I envy the traffic-guarded Marble Arch. Rabbits, Bowles rightly remarked, “can do much mischief in a night or two”. Mice regard the round hard corms as a delicacy. Grey squirrels rank them as highly as nuts and will descend on them within hours of planting.
This year a particular raider has proliferated, the pheasant. Millions of pheasants have been released into the woods of sporting and shooting landowners, but shoots in late December and January were then banned in lockdown. Hordes of pheasants are roaming at large. They treat my garden as a safe haven and strut round it showing off to females and pecking to death young crocuses.
Which crocuses persist well if planted in lawn grass? The Dutch yellows, headed by Yellow Mammoth, are usually great survivors, as is the lovely big white Joan of Arc, particularly fine when mixed with purple-blue Remembrance. However, results vary after the first two or three years, often for no obvious reason.
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The winner, even among badgers, is Crocus tommasinianus, that delicate crocus with flowers of varying shades of lavender to purple on the inner and outer sides of its petals. Its corms are still very cheap to buy and as they are small and go deep down into the ground when they settle in, even Squirrel Nutkin leaves them alone.
In nature this crocus is at home in the states of former Yugoslavia, but it attracts early bees in Britain too and is a non-native beauty, enhancing diversity. The basic species will seed itself and after three or four years will add many more corms to its initial carpet.
Variations on it range from a lovely white through fine selections with names like Eric Smith to a deeper rose-purple. The deeper colours, however, do not seed themselves.
The earliest multi-flowering crocus on general release was first found in Turkey, Crocus ancyrensis, named Golden Bunch in the trade. It too is
a fine choice, carrying several deep yellow flowers from each corm, but it has one failing. As its flowers open near the end of January, its stems are usually short of sunlight. They are quite weak as a result. Golden Bunch is even better in shallow pots or pans on a balcony and brought indoors when in bud.
My personal favourites do not persist in grass, the heavenly Blue Pearl and its pair, Cream Beauty, and the charming etruscus from the Maremma region of west Tuscany. The lavender and yellow varieties are lovely choices, both widely available. I have taken to growing all these ones too in pots so that they can stay away from pheasants and storms. In this locked-down year, crocuses have re-emerged as winners in pots, ideal for new or confined gardeners.
After nearly 4,000 years of delight for their growers, crocuses, our oldest friends, are still versatile and full of vigour. Give them a special welcome.
Robin Lane Fox will be in discussion with gardener and writer Sarah Raven at the FT Weekend Digital Festival, March 18-20; ftweekendfestival.com
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