BEHIND DOOR #1...

Meet the consummate plantsman and celebrated hortisexual from northern California Roger Raiche. Roger's the first in a line of what I hope will be many guest bloggers here at ketzel.com; you could be the second. If you send out regular e-mails to subscribers or have a blog of your own, gimme a look-see.

It's at this early time of the year as the low elevation California landscape has begun to wake up that I find myself almost desperate for some floral sign that renewal is on its way.  Although there will be far more flowers in late March and April, more diversity and more amazing masses and mixes of colors and scents, it's the first wildflowers each season that mark my personal internal calendar and affect me the most.

 First flower scape of Muscari macrocarpum, mid January; note second scape emerging on right.

In the garden, it's the same craving that attracts me to the earliest flowering bulbs, shrubs, annuals or perennials. Among my favorite is a lovely bulb from Greece and SW Turkey currently called Muscari macrocapum ‘Golden Fragrance’.  I’m not sure if the cultivar name, ‘Golden Fragrance’, is any different than the species; I suspect it's just to give the catalogue descriptions more “sex appeal".

Regardless, when I first saw it about 10 years ago I assumed because it was rare back then that it must be very hard to grow. I was mistaken.  I grew it in my Berkeley CA garden, then in our Sebastopol, CA garden,and now in our Calistoga garden, but it is only here that I’ve used it in mass (the price of bulbs came down significantly in recent years). 

It's a winter bulb in our climate, starting to show foliage in December and flowering in mid-January, and will continue at least into late March.  It loves our summer-dry climate, but also does well in beds with routine water.  In fact it has come up in every spot I’ve planted it from sun to light shade (deciduous and evergreen trees), rock, gravel, garden soil, clay.

Here's Muscari macrocarpum in mid-February with second set of flowering scapes. Another sequence will follow into March.

Sometimes called the yellow flowered muscari or grape-hyacinth, it's actually a complex color, starting off a dull bluish purple and then quickly changing to a chartreuse-yellow in primary flower. But its biggest plus (I would grow it even if the flowers were 1/10th the size or colored brown) is its intense sweet fragrance. 

I’ve planted drifts throughout the garden so wafts of the fragrance fill the winter air on still days and even days of mild breezes. You loose track of the number of times you stop whatever you are doing to say to yourself, “What a lovely fragrance!”  You don’t even have to be near the plants, the fragrance just drifts around. 

Unlike paper-white Narcissus, it has none of the chemical smell that makes some folks gag.  The fragrance is clean and sweet, reminding me of Daphne or hyacinth, potent yet pleasant.  And the flowers appear in a sequence over many weeks, so it’s not one of those one-shot wonders like tulips. This four-star marvel's available from almost all the bulb companies.

If you want to read Roger's stuff without my interference (sorry about the editing, Roger), ask him to add you to his e-mail list at roger@planethorticulture.com