Park Seed Garden Journal

I wrote the other day about how early autumn is my favorite time of year, especially early fall.  Like I mentioned, though, I realize that, for many gardeners, Spring is where it’s at.  It is certainly among the most exciting times of year in the garden, with all sorts of things coming out of dormancy or budding leaves or blooming.  It’s great fun, especially when you’ve got some great flowers coming up and putting out blooms early in the season.  Unfortunately, though, it’s not just April Showers that bring Spring Flowers, it’s also fall planting.

For a great early garden, my first recommendation is always Spring-blooming bulbs.  Tulips and Daffodils, especially, are some of the very best plants for a great Spring show.  Daffodils excel in the early Spring, and around here they act as some of the first heralds of the season.  Tulip bulbs, on the other hand, produce what many consider to be the classic Spring flower.  Or, if you’re looking for something different and interesting in warmer areas, try Daphne Eternal Fragrance.  It blooms early and for months, producing a wonderful fragrance to ring in the new Spring with scent as well as beauty.

(and Yes, I know that the saying goes "April Showers bring May Flowers."  Cut me some slack!)

Most gardeners that I’ve known (and I work at a garden company, so that’s more than a few to say the least) have expressed a great love for changing seasons.  The coming of spring is when most gardeners really thrill, as this is the coming of the best gardening season, and the budding and growing of new plants stirs something deep in the human soul. 

For me, though, it is this time of year that opens me up to the world around me most.  The first day when it is truly chilly each year is one of the greatest thrills for me.  I can taste in the air the promise of what is coming: hooded sweatshirts, autumn veggies, hikes among falling leaves, and football.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, and when the weather demands a jacket for the first time of the year I can smell toasting pumpkin seeds just around the bend.

Of course, I say this every year at the beginning of the Fall, and I mean it.  But, come Spring, I always end up pronouncing how the beginning of Spring is my favorite time of year.  Don’t listen to me then, though.  It’s totally Autumn.

When I was a kid growing up in South Carolina, we took the name of Honeysuckle vines pretty literally.  I learned on the playground in elementary school how to pick the flowers and draw the stamen through the bloom very slowly, yielding a dollop of the sweetest nectar I’ve ever tasted.  Of course, looking back on that I realize that our school maintenance crew wasn’t exactly shy with the pesticides, and I expect a variety of ill health effects to present any day now.  Still, possibly worth it.  Yum.  (Mind you, Honeysuckle is a pretty tough plant, and those pesticides were probably completely unnecessary.  Still, it was a different time.)

Drawing out that nectar took a surprising amount of patience and skill (for 8-year-olds, anyway).  The stamen would break quite easily, or the nectar would drop off onto the ground, or the flower itself would tear, leaving the nectar insufficiently concentrated to drop onto the tongue. It became a sort of contest (as all things at that age tend to) to see who could get the biggest drops of nectar.  I look back on that very fondly, and I still find that when I’m working in my mother’s garden near her large Honeysuckle plants that have taken over a part of the back fence, I can’t help but pinch off a bud or two to see if I’ve still got the skills to get at that delicious ambrosia.  This time, at least, I know that there are no pesticides on the flowers.

Many of us here at Park Seed (especially here in the E-commerce department) don’t spend much time dealing with the actual plants that we sell on a day-to-day basis.  Sure, most of us are gardeners, and all but a very few of us have plants on our desks (they ward off the crazy), but we don’t get as much excuse to go out back to the greenhouses as we would like.  We certainly spend much of our days reading about these plants, but that can never really give you the best idea of the plant itself.  The written descriptions are more like the platonic ideal of the plant, and it’s the real plant on this realm that we’re really concerned with.

There are a few things that we do to try to balance this out, though.  During the relevant seasons, most of us go to the Garden Center about once a week (mostly to fill our own gardens).  We also have some of the most amazing trial gardens you’re likely to find anywhere right here on site, and many of us visit these regularly (especially during our monthly E-Com team picnic out there in the warm months).  We try to get our friendly resident master gardeners to show us around out there some whenever we can, too.  On Flower Day each year we get to spend a whole day out there getting to know not only the plants, but our customers, too.

The absolute best chance we get for more experience with the actual plants, though, is physical inventory.  We do this twice a year, and pretty much the entire company chips in and goes out there to count, well, everything.  Most of us spend two or three days each inventory out in the plant, greenhouses, or in the open growing areas, and it’s great fun.  I had the good luck to be on the live plant team this summer, and got to spend three and a half days out back playing with more plants than you could imagine.  I learn more about plants in a single day of inventory than I do in a week of my regular job, and I’m sure that it’s that way for many of us.  These are, of course, just a few of the ways that we try to stay as connected to our product as we can.

Saffron Crocus is a truly stunning flower.  The Crocus is one of my favorite flower forms, and the Crocus sativus is one of the most beautiful.  It is also, though, a flower with a unique history.

As you probably know, the spice Saffron is made from the dried stigma and style of the Saffron Crocus flower.  Saffron is often cited as the most expensive spice in the world, and it’s not hard to believe if you check out prices at the grocery store.  Unlike many expensive spices, Saffron is not so expensive because of the difficulty of growing it or a very limited growing range.  Rather, it’s because each flower produces a very small amount of the spice.

Saffron is also valuable as an ingredient in many traditional medicines, including some to treat melancholy, going back thousands of years.  I don’t know how effective it is as a remedy, but I can say that it’s difficult to keep an ill humor going in the face of good Saffron-laden food.  Saffron is used as a very high-end dye as well, prized for its uniform and rich golden-yellow hue.  Buddhist monks in some parts of the world have dyed their robes saffron since the death of the Buddha (the gold of the Dalai Lama’s robes is saffron), though all but a very few groups use much less expensive substitutes, such as turmeric.

In cooking, Saffron is associated with many different regional cuisines.  In many parts of the world it is also used to lightly aromatize wine, chocolates, and tea.  It is entirely possible that much of Saffron’s tremendous value is simply because it is percieved to be so valuable.  However, it has been so valued for thousands of years.  Wars have been fought for control of this brilliant yellow powder, and now you can simply grow your own at home.