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May the Force be With You

© Emily Levitt

With a last minute caveat--yes, it's late to do this, but not too late to get amaryllis up for Christmas, or white narcissus for the New Years' Eve celebration...read on!

The list of bulbs which need no pre-chilling in order to pop up in time for the holidays are:

Amaryllis, Allium neapolitanum, Allium rosenbachianum, Anemone de Caen and Anemone St.Brigid, Brodiaea laxa, Crocus chrysanthus (snow crocus), Dutch iris, Freesia, Ixias, lilies, all narcissi/daffodils, Ornithogalum umbellatum, Ranunculus, Scilla campanulata (wood hyacinth), Sparaxis, Triteleia uniflora and Tritoni. There's more information at Bulb.Com --
http://www.bulb.com/index.html

Years ago, when we lived in Chicago, I noticed tanning salons on evey corner in the city, and I thought the natives must be addicted to the cosmetic effects. After my first winter, I realized that the population craved ultraviolet light. It was dark at four in the afternoon! And for months! When would spring ever arrive?

Tanning beds hold no cachet for me, but I couldn't have made it through the Illinois winters without the springtime presence of forced bulbs in the house. Living green fragrance made me feel more like a nice human being, and less like a grumpy cave dweller.

I placed containers of forced bulbs from a florist all around the house, to cheer myself up. It worked, and I found the flowers delightful, but pricey in our neighborhood.

We lived in Chicago's Lincoln Park, and nurseries were few and far between. It was on a trip to the suburbs that we found a mega mart store with a big garden center and bins of nice inexpensive bulbs.

I became a forcing fool.

One of the more expensive containers I'd bought had narcissus and grape hyacinths in it. I was beside myself when I found out how cheap they were if you bought them "raw." Paperwhite narcissus reamins my favorite to this day---nothing smells more like Easter to me--but I found out my that my husband thinks they stink. While we lived in our house on Fullerton , he learned to live with them.

The neat thing about working with bulbs in forcing is the schedule you can set for your flowers. I start potting up bulbs at ten day intervals, so that it's easy to replace blooms on the fade with fresh ones on a regular basis. Color schemes are incredibly simple, too. The range of colors available is bigger every year. The biggest challenge I have faced comes from my cats (who like to play with the plants and the dirt) and staking some of the bigger bulbs, like amaryllis.

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