COLCHICUMS are dramatic and colourful plants to brighten up our gardens at the end of the season, with a freshness that is more spring-like than autumnal. You see them in garden centres from the end of July onwards —large lumpy corms with white flesh revealed beneath the crackling brown skin (technically, a membranous tunic). The flowers start to emerge from August to October and will do so even if the corm has not been planted. Sometimes, you see naked, unsold bulbs already flowering rather pathetically in their various shades of pink or pale purple.
Everyone starts by thinking these gorgeous creatures are autumn crocuses, whereupon horticultural smarty-boots delight in pointing out that they’re not even in the same botanical family. The truth is that colchicums do indeed resemble crocuses, at least to the nonbotanical eye, but they are generally taller, up to 8in tall and more substantial in appearance. Some have pretty markings on their petals (accurately, tepals); others are white-flowered or doubles. For real experts, there is even a bright-yellow spring-flowering species called C. luteum, but it is not easy to cultivate well.
There are about 100 species and almost all the easy-to-grow ones are native to the hills of the Mediterranean, eastward into Turkey and Central Asia. Our own native Colchicum autumnale, however, occurs as far north as the Baltic sea. Travellers encounter it by the million in the meadows of France, Switzerland, Germany and northern Italy.
Denne historien er fra August 4, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra August 4, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
