For several years I have planted the hyacinth flowers that I bought in baskets to enliven my desk at work, in the garden when they lost their flowers. I figured that a bulb is a bulb…and let’s see what happens! If what some people say is true, that they are so genetically manipulated that they will not grow next year….well, nothing would be lost.
But to my great pleasure, ‘ they’ were completely wrong. The flowers came back next year, and next year, and next year. They gave color to our garden, and me the small satisfaction of proving ‘ them’ wrong. Nothing personal, but I saw it as a victory of nature against the disposable tendencies of society. Sometimes, you should just plant something, and give it a chance!
After a number of years my bulbs started to embrace their wild roots, I think at least, because I see small changes every year in the flower petals, and how they are arranged. I think, they are shedding the full flowered, ‘ look at me’ genes that were breeded into them, and are reverting to a much more modest display. And in their modest way, almost more impressive than the full candlestick of little flowers that they had originally.
I must stop myself here and realize not everybody has recently looked close at a flowering hyacinth, or maybe never quit took the time to look at them up-close….for whatever reasons, I do not judge….a hyacinth has lots of small flowers arranged around a stem, and the way there are sold in general, the entire top of the stem is covered with them in a circular fashion. It is a blazing, proud display of color and deserves all the admiration it gets every year.
But, but…after some years of living free in our back garden, growing, flowering, hiding all autumn and winter in their bulb and then returning for a bright display…they start to have less flowers, and no longer 360 degrees around the stem. They start to concentrate the flowers on one side! And not in a disorganized way, no, they start to drop entire vertical lines of flowers! Slowly but surely, I suspect, the flowers will concentrate on a small part of the stem!
This does not worry me at all. Would I like too have full flowering hyacinths, that pop out like bold splashes of color in spring, when nature is still mostly asleep? Of course, of course…but I get to see how a cultivated inside plant goes back to it, excuse the bad joke, roots. It is deeply satisfying.