Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with
underscores: _italics_.
HANDBOOKS OF PRACTICAL GARDENING--V
EDITED BY HARRY ROBERTS
THE BOOK OF BULBS
[Illustration: EARLY TULIPS]
THE BOOK OF BULBS
BY
S. ARNOTT, F.R.H.S.
TOGETHER WITH AN INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER ON THE BOTANY
OF BULBS BY THE EDITOR
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON AND NEW YORK. MCMI
_Printed by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh._
CONTENTS
PAGE
Editor's Note x
Concerning Bulbs xi
Introductory 1
Value of Bulbs--Bulbs in Grass--Arrangement in Borders--Bulbs
for Cutting--Propagating Bulbs--Diseases of Bulbs.
Hardy Bulbs 7
Aconitums--Alliums--Alstrœmerias--Anemones.
Hardy Bulbs 15
Amaryllises--Anthericums--Antholyzas--Apios--Arisæ--Arums--
Asphodelines--Asphodeluses--Belamcanda--Bloomerias--Brodiæas
--Bulbocodiums.
Hardy Bulbs 21
Calochorti and Cyclobothras--Camassias--Colchicums--
Convallarias--Forcing Lily of the Valley--Corydalises--
Crinums--Crocosmias and Montbretias--Crocuses.
Hardy Bulbs 29
Cyclamens--Dicentras--Dieramas--Eranthis--Eremuruses--
Erythroniums--Eucomises.
Hardy Bulbs 35
Fritillarias--Funkias--Galanthuses--Galtonias--Gladioli--
Hemerocallises.
Hardy Bulbs 42
Hyacinths--Hyacinths in Pots--Scillas--Puschkinias--
Chionodoxas--Chionoscillas--Muscaris.
Hardy Bulbs 48
Irises--Kniphofias--Lapeyrousias--Leucojums.
Hardy Bulbs 54
Liliums--Liliums in Pots--Malvastrum--Merenderas--Millas--
Narcissi--Narcissi in Pots.
Hardy Bulbs 60
Ornithogalums--Oxalises--Pæonias--Ranunculuses--Romuleas--
Sanguinarias--Sternbergias--Schizostylis--Tecophilæas--
Trilliums.
Hardy Bulbs 65
Tulips--Zephyranthes.
Half-hardy Bulbs 72
Acidantheras--Albucas--Alstroemerias--Androstephiums--
Besseras--Boussingaultias--Bravoas--Cypellas--Dahlias--
Galaxias--Geissorhizas and Hesperanthas.
Half-hardy Bulbs 77
Gladioli--Ixias--Sparaxises--Babianas--Morphixias--Tritonias.
Half-hardy Bulbs 83
Ixiolirions--Moræas--Ornithogalums--Oxalises--Phædranassas
--Pancratiums--Tigridias--Zephyranthes--Cooperias.
Greenhouse and Stove Bulbs 90
Achimenes--Alocasias--Amorphophalluses--Arisæmas--Arums--
Begonias--Bomareas--Caladiums.
Greenhouse and Stove Bulbs 97
Clivias--Colocasias--Crinums--Cyclamens--Cyrtanthuses--
Eucharises and Urceocharis--Eurycles.
Greenhouse and Stove Bulbs 102
Freesias--Gloxinias--Hæmanthuses--Hippeastrums.
Greenhouse and Stove Bulbs 109
Lachenalias--Nerines and Lycorises--Pancratiums and
Hymenocallises--Richardias--Sprekelias--Tuberoses--Vallotas
--Watsonias--Zephyranthes.
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
EARLY TULIPS
(from a drawing by Ethel Roskruge) _Frontispiece_
SNOWDROPS IN GRASS 3
ALLIUM TRIQUETRUM 9
WHITE CROCUSES IN GRASS 25
EREMURUS ROBUSTUS 31
GLADIOLUS, "THE BRIDE" 39
SNOWFLAKES 51
TULIPS CARPETED BY ARABIS 67
LILIUM AURATUM 85
LILIUM CANDIDUM 93
WHITE SCILLAS 103
EDITOR'S NOTE
Like many another distinguished gardener, Mr Arnott is a Scotsman,
being a native of Dumfries, and now living in the adjoining county of
Kirkcudbright. For the last fourteen years his name has been a familiar
one to readers of the leading journals devoted to gardening, for he has
been a very frequent contributor to _The Gardener's Chronicle_, _The
Gardener's Magazine_, _The Garden_, _The Journal of Horticulture_, and
other papers. Although not a professional gardener, Mr Arnott is a
practical one, for he manages at least the flower department of his
beautiful garden almost without assistance; and having spent most of
his life amongst flowers--his mother being a great gardener--he is a
successful plant grower, as well as an interested one.
Mr Arnott takes an active part in the work of encouraging the gardening
spirit among his countrymen, and is a member of the Scientific
Committee of the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, as well as a
member of other leading associations with similar aims.
CONCERNING BULBS
BY THE EDITOR
Anyone who has observed ever so casually the order of flowering of the
plants in garden or hedgerow, must have noticed that bulbous plants
figure prominently amongst those which flower in the early months of
the year. Winter Aconite, Snowdrop, Crocus, Scilla, Chionodoxa,
Daffodil, Fritillary, Anemone, and Tulip are among the greatest
treasures of the spring garden, and though these are not all strictly
bulbous plants, they all have either bulbous, tuberous, or other
enlarged form of root or underground stem which serves a like purpose.
Even those early flowers, the primroses, are borne on plants whose
thick, fleshy, underground parts are almost tuberous in appearance; and
it will be found that all the earliest blooming plants of spring are
furnished with large stores of nutriment in root or stem. Only by
virtue of these granaries of materialised solar energy, accumulated
during the spring and summer of the previous year, are plants able to
manufacture leaves and beautiful flowers in those early months during
which the sun yields little heat and light, so essential to healthy
plant life.
In a sense, we may consider bulbs and tubers as functionally equivalent
to seeds, for they contain within sundry wrappings a dormant plant and
stores of food material, wherewith the young plant may be nourished
from the time when growth commences until the plant can fend for
itself.
It is easy to understand how great an advantage it may be to a plant,
in which cross-fertilisation is essential to racial vigour, to open its
flowers before the great armies of floral rivals expose their baits to
the gaze of flying insects whose visits are desired. For a like reason,
it is advantageous to certain flowers to appear late in autumn after
the summer flowers have withered and the competition for insect
visitors has abated. These also have usually woody stems, or bulbous or
tuberous rhizomes or roots, in which are stored reserves of starch,
sugar, and other foods formed in the season of sunlight. Fibrous-rooted
plants, on the other hand, for the most part flower between the months
of April and September, when the daily hours of sunlight are many.
We commonly speak of the bulbs of crocuses as of tulips or of onions,
but morphologically there is a distinction, although functionally there
is little or none. If we examine a tulip bulb, we find that it is
mainly composed of thick succulent scales which closely overlap one
another, in the centre being a flattish axis continuous with the roots
below, and with the leaf and flower-bearing stalk above. This axis is
part of the tulip's stem, the fleshy scales being morphologically but
modified leaves whose basal portions have become swollen with stores of
nutriment. After the tulip has flowered, it sets to work to manufacture
fresh supplies of food material which is sent down the stem and there
accumulated in a new bulb, formed by the development of a bud contained
among the scales of the old and now withered bulb of the previous year.
These stores will, in the following season, enable the tulip to cut a
pretty figure before it or other plant has had time or opportunity for
preparing fresh supplies by the aid of the spring-time sun alone.
The so-called bulb of the crocus has a somewhat different structure.
The crocus "bulb" does not, like that of the tulip, consist of
overlapping scales, but of a more or less homogeneous mass enclosed in
a stiff membrane, within which may sometimes be seen two or three
smaller membranes of similar structure. From the lower part of the
"bulb" issue roots, and from its summit proceed the leaf-bearing and
flower-bearing shoots. The crocus "bulb" is not strictly what botanists
call a bulb, but is a corm ([Greek: Kormos] = a stem), the expansion
being composed of the swollen base of the stem and not, as with true
bulbs, of the leaves--the latter having degenerated into mere
membranous sheaths, which have no function beyond serving as protective
envelopes for the food store and living nucleus within. As in the case
of the tulip, so the crocus, having flowered in the early days of the
year, proceeds to make and store up fresh supplies of starch and other
food in readiness for the following year. The base of the stem enlarges
above the old and withering corm, from which it sucks the remaining
nutriment. Fresh roots are formed, some of which, having penetrated the
soil to a varying depth, contract in length, and so draw down the new
corm to the level of the old.
This contractile power of roots has another office of great interest in
connection with bulbs and corms. I have said that new bulbs form around
the old exhausted ones by the development of buds in the axils of the
leaf scales. It is obvious that in this way overcrowding must result,
and that the young bulbs must often fare badly through being obliged to
seek nourishment from soil already half exhausted of the elements
necessary for the plants' health. But by the development of lateral
roots which subsequently contract, such bulbs are often pulled to an
appreciable distance from their parent, and thus gradually by yearly
steps spread over a considerable area. Kerner quotes an interesting
illustration of this process. Some soil containing bulbs of Tulipa
sylvestris was once put in a garden in Vienna in the middle of a grass
plot shaded by maple trees. As the grass was mowed every year before
the flowers opened there was no formation of seeds, and the tulips
could only multiply by offshoots. After about twenty years, the lawn
was covered with tulip leaves, which arose from subterranean bulbs
occupying an area ten paces in diameter. Thus, in the time mentioned,
the bulbs had spread for about five paces in all directions in
consequence of the pull of the contracting roots.
Indeed, the underground life of bulbous plants, both during their more
active stages of growth, and in those times mistakenly spoken of as the
periods of rest, is full of interest to the careful observer. That
curious process of ripening which is essential to the health of nearly
all bulbs is itself no merely mechanical change. Each plant has its
peculiar time for bursting through the surface of earth, for expanding
its first leaves, and for displaying the glory of its first blooms; and
any material hastening of these processes by the artificial application
of heat means, except in a few species, subsequent debility to the
plant, and, as a rule (though not invariably), diminished character in
the flowers thus forced. There are, however, plants, such as Lilies of
the Valley, to which the so-called resting stage seems of less duration
and importance, and it is such flowers which may be forced under
carefully arranged conditions with little ill result.
Among our English wild flowering plants, the principal ones furnished
with bulbs or corms are to be found in the orders Iridaceæ,
Amaryllidaceæ, and Liliaceæ. Included in the former are the very rare
purplish flower known as Columna's trichonema, and the doubtfully
native Crocus sativus, the autumnal saffron crocus, referred to by
Hakluyt at the close of the sixteenth century: "This commodity of
Saffron groweth fifty miles from Tripoli, in Syria, on an high hyll,
called in those parts Gasian, so as there you may learn at that part of
Tripoli the value of the pound, the goodnesse of it, and the places of
the vent. But it is said that from that hyll there passeth yerely of
that commodity fifteen moiles laden, and that those regions
notwithstanding lacke sufficiency of that commodity. But if a vent
might be found, men would in Essex (about Saffron Walden), and in
Cambridgeshire, revive the trade for the benefit of the setting of the
poore on worke. So would they do in Herefordshire, by Wales, where the
best of all England is, in which place the soil yields the wilde
Saffron commonly, which showeth the natural inclination of the same
soile to the bearing of the right Saffron, if the soile be manured and
that way employed."
The Amaryllis order contains the Daffodil and the Snowdrop, as well as
Leucojum æstivum, which is thought by some to be a native species. It
is, however, the order of the Liliaceæ to which belong the majority of
English bulbous flowering plants. Bluebells, like "heavens upbreaking
through the earth," purple Fritillaries, yellow Tulips, Stars of
Bethlehem with curious greenish flowers, Vernal Scillas, the
not-so-pretty S. autumnalis, and the Broad-leaved Garlic, whose white
flowers are among the most beautiful of all, though the scent of the
whole plant is very "grosse and very unpleasant for fayre ladies and
tender lily rose colloured damsels which often time profereth sweet
breathes before gentle wordes." There are a few other British bulbous
and cormous plants scattered among the various orders, such as the
Meadow-saffron which is still used in pharmacy, but the greater number
are contained in the three orders named.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Value of Bulbs--Bulbs in Grass--Arrangement in Borders--Bulbs for
Cutting--Propagating Bulbs--Diseases of Bulbs
BULBOUS AND TUBEROUS PLANTS
Our gardens owe so much of their charm to the free use of plants with
bulbous or tuberous roots, that it is unnecessary to impress their
value upon the reader. We have only to cast our thoughts upon the many
flowers of this character which bloom from the dawn of the year to its
close, to recognise their almost transcendent claims upon our notice.
In the following pages an attempt has been made to assist those who
wish to know something more than they have done about these plants.
Much more could have been said, but the scope of the work would not
permit of exhaustive details. In addition, however, to the information
given in the chapters dealing with the various plants, it is desirable
that a few general hints should be given regarding the uses of these
plants, and how they may be turned to most account.
BULBS IN THE GRASS
One of the most delightful phases of bulb-growing is that of the
cultivation of hardy species in the grass. Nowhere do they look so well
as against the grass, whose leafage seems to harmonise so well with the
general character of the bulbous plants. In addition to this, many of
these bulbous plants will thrive much better in grass than in a
cultivated border, where there is often too much bare soil, and where
other flowers of encroaching nature can injure them. Nearly all hardy
bulbs do well in grass if the place is properly prepared for them by
removing a portion of the turf, forking up the earth beneath, and
adding fresh soil when it is too poor, and then replacing the turf. One
thing must be remembered as a _sine-qua-non_, and this is, that on
no account must the grass be cut until the plants have ripened their
leaves. This will be shown by the foliage becoming yellow. Neglect of
this has been the cause of much disappointment, and it is thus
advisable that the bulbs should not be planted where a neatly kept
grass plot is wanted early in the year. In planting the bulbs, they
ought not to be arranged in regular lines, but in masses or informal
groups. As good a plan as any to follow in planting in masses in the
wilder parts of the grounds, is to throw the bulbs down from the hand,
and to plant them where they fall. A good lesson will be given by a
glance at a long-established plantation of Snowdrops or of the wild
Scilla nutans, where these will be seen to have formed charming groups
and masses of greater beauty than any formal arrangement would give.
ARRANGEMENT IN BORDERS
It is more difficult to arrange bulbs in borders in pleasing ways, and
in such a manner as to harmonise or contrast in colouring with other
flowers in bloom at the same time. One desirable way is not to keep all
the early flowering bulbs near the front of the border, as one would
naturally do, because of their dwarf habit, but to plant them so as to
give balance in the border at the different seasons. Bulbous plants,
like most others, look better in groups than scattered singly in lines,
and it is wiser, as a rule, to plant a clump of one kind than a mixed
mass. One exception, at least, is in the Montbretias, which, when
mixed, look even prettier than in separate groups of one shade. Colour
arrangement is always a troublesome question in planting these flowers,
and there is more satisfaction, if harmony instead of sharp contrast is
aimed at, by arranging, say, different shades of yellow together, than
in working to secure strong contrasting effects. Such a contrast as the
white Galtonia candicans and Gladiolus brenchleyensis is striking at
the time, but it is not one on which the eye would love to dwell from
day to day and from hour to hour.
[Illustration: SNOWDROPS IN GRASS]
BULBS FOR CUTTING
These plants afford an almost endless choice for cutting purposes,
although some cannot be cut of great length of stem without destroying
the strength of the bulb for another year. The flowers are generally
best when cut before quite open, and such flowers will usually open
perfectly in water, and will last much longer than if pulled when fully
expanded. Where many flowers are used, it is better to grow a stock in
the reserve garden or in an out-of-the-way border, to avoid destroying
the beauty of the more conspicuous parts of the garden.
PROPAGATING BULBS
The greater number of bulbs are propagated by offsets, produced from
the old bulbs, and which are best removed when the foliage has died
down. Named Hyacinths are increased by cutting across the base of the
bulbs, or scooping out the interior, afterwards allowing the wounds to
callous partially. Young bulbs are produced at the wounded parts.
Raising bulbs from seeds, although slow, is very interesting work, and
ought to be more largely followed for the purpose of obtaining new
varieties. Seeds are sown in the ordinary way in pans, and the young
bulbs grown on until they attain flowering size, generally from two to
five years, according to the genus and the treatment they receive.
Liliums are also propagated by scales of the bulbs, inserted in pots or
pans, with a portion of the base attached. These will eventually form
little bulbs, to be grown on as in the case of seedlings.
Tuberous-rooted plants, like the Anemone, are propagated by division of
the tubers.
DISEASES OF BULBS
These plants are subject to a variety of diseases, such as always
appear among plants grown in large numbers together. The leading
genera, such as the Lilium, the Iris, the Gladiolus, or the Hyacinth,
are all affected, and although many remedies have been tried it is
difficult to find a cure. I find Veltha gives good results, but where
the disease cannot be exterminated by such means it is better to
destroy all affected plants, and to give the others fresh soil. A
surface dressing of new soil with a little kainit added is beneficial.